Zero to CF in Kube-Cluster in 30 Seconds with Concourse, Helm, Fissile and Eirini

Steffen Uhlig, IBM & Akshay Mankar, Pivotal

Track: Cloud Foundry for Business Experience Level: Beginner

Thursday, April 4 • 3:40pm - 4:10pm

Abstract

Creating a new Cloud Foundry instance has never been easier. With the advent of Fissile and Project Eirini, deploying a new CF has become a matter of invoking a few scripts, fired from a command line.

The Eirini team took this even further with a 1-click approach. In this talk, we will share how we, with the press of a button, create a new Concourse pipeline that creates a new Kubernetes cluster, deploys Cloud Foundry to it, runs CATs, and hands it over to the requester.

We will present an approach to CI/CD that yields standardized development environments resulting in a shorter time to first deploy, with less confusion where to find important information about your environments. With our 1-click pipeline, your kube cluster with CF is not a pet anymore - if in doubt, you can kill and re-create it in seconds.

High-level Story

• Audience

  • Architects
  • Operators
  • CF Developers
  • Developing on top of CF
  • NOT: application developers that just deploy to CF

• Why would you want to do this?

  • You are developing a CF component
  • You are developing on top of CF, e.g. a tool
  • Test-drive

• "The minikube-equivalent for CF"

• Key thing to win: consistency

  • cookie-cutter approach to creating test environments
  • vagrant philosophy - repeatable dev envs

• Where do we start?

  1. start with the end result and go back
  2. or: build it up

Start with the end result

Movie: In a terminal, someone types

`set-pipeline foobar`

• wait a few minutes (fast forward)
• come back after 15 minutes and see your CF deployed on k8s
• look at the output of the last task and see all the important info:

  Welcome to your new deployment of SCF.
  
  The endpoint for use by the `cf` client is
      https://api.158.176.93.34.nip.io
  
  To target this endpoint run
      cf api --skip-ssl-validation https://api.158.176.93.34.nip.io
  
  Please remember, it may take some time for everything to come online.
  
  You can use
      kubectl get pods --namespace scf
  

• in the video, show pods getting created just like the general Eirini demo
• all config under version control
• did not provide any custom values beyond foobar
• save myvalues as state in git

Why did we do this?

• easy setup of a new, rather complex pipeline
• large team, do not step on each other's toes
• pets vs. cattle
• speed
• "feature branch" pipelines
• quick onboarding of new team members
• change stuff once, apply "everywhere"

TODO

• master gets cf-pushed to a staging space
• releases gets cf-pushed to the production space

Feedback

• Took around 20 minutes in total
• We should provide more details about what exactly happens in our pipeline (not just "there is a magic pipeline").
• Some in the audience did not know much about SCF and Eirini yet, maybe we can add some details about those upfront
• Mention more prominently that this is ibmcloud-only so far