How CD and GitOps Help You Build a Successful K8s Platform
Increasingly, businesses are turning to Kubernetes as the go-to container orchestration platform to manage containerized applications efficiently. One important aspect of creating a great Kubernetes platform experience is by making it easy to deploy applications using continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. When you think about internal developer platforms (sometimes called IDPs) for Kubernetes, the goal is to build a platform that minimizes the need for your development team to make infrastructure decisions while making it easy for developers to self-service environment builds. To be successful, it also needs to integrate with continuous CI/CD processes. A good IDP provides a self-service layer for developers, with guardrails and security features to ensure the apps and services you’ve deployed run securely, reliably, and cost-efficiently.
Must-Haves in a Kubernetes Platform
Inevitably, some developers know more about Kubernetes than others and want to dig into the details of K8s, while others are focused solely on their app or service. The goal of a platform is to make it easy to deploy to K8s without putting your environment or deployments at risk. In Kubernetes, a platform must include five main components:
- Add-ons — The tools your platform engineers or DevOps team want installed in your clusters, tools that enable you to get traffic into the cluster, expose apps externally, add certificates, configure DNS, provide autoscaling and provision new nodes as needed.
- Governance — How you apply and enforce policies related to security, reliability and cost efficiency.
- CI/CD — How you apply best practices in your cluster using automation. This article dives more deeply into how to apply CD and follow best practices in your cluster.
- Monitoring & Feedback — Identifying issues and remediation suggestions to developers during code review.
- Cost Management & Reporting — Ensuring you understand cloud spend even in ephemeral Kubernetes environments.
Continuous Deployment in Kubernetes
Together, Kubernetes and CI/CD automate application management processes. While Kubernetes manages containerized application deployment and scaling, CI/CD pipelines automate the process of integrating code changes and deploying updated code to production environments. We often use the terms CI and CD interchangeably, but they are two sides of a solution that work together. Continuous integration is based on continuous code integration and provides a means of automating builds and testing to achieve this. It can also shift best practices and policy enforcement left in the development process. Continuous delivery addresses how developers can get their code into their various environments faster and ensure standardization in their deployments. Many tools do both CI and CD, but this article focuses on GitOps and ArgoCD and how they can help you build a better IDP.
GitOps is a popular method of implementing continuous delivery. GitOps helps automate application deployment and infrastructure provisioning, allowing teams to use familiar software development tools to manage application and infrastructure changes. Argo CD is an open source GitOps tool that monitors your clusters and declarative infrastructure and resolves the differences based on what’s stored in Git. It automates application deployment and allows you to ensure anyone can view the infrastructure but that no one unauthorized is able to delete or modify it. This visibility is helpful for debugging issues; for example, if developers can’t determine whether a request is reaching the ingress controller to your pod, they can view the ingress controller logs to see what’s actually happening. Developers can also look at the live manifest to see what’s taking place in the cluster without requiring the exposure of secrets, allowing platform teams to maintain security while enabling developers to troubleshoot issues effectively.
This approach allows you to empower and enable your developers rather than restricting them by locking everything down. A platform team can set up the GitHub repository and the credentials that allow Argo CD to talk to the repositories needed, making it simple to provide access to your code repos automatically and deploy new applications. You can easily see where the infrastructure repo is added in the Argo CD configuration, which Argo does via secrets that have annotations on them using specific labels. You can also pre-populate credentials and split them between two different objects and create a repo template in Argo CD that’s been deployed with the credentials. Consider configuring that ahead of time, which will help prevent your developers from attempting to create access tokens with more access than needed.
Another good option is to set up the repo template as a specific type of object in Argo CD using the user interface or set it up so your developers can create applications using YAML. That enables teams to build their own app of apps for Argo CD, enabling a self-service model that allows your developers to deploy the way they want, maintain visibility into what’s happening and still troubleshoot effectively.
Continuous Deployment in Your Kubernetes IDP
Continuous deployment is critical to building a successful Kubernetes IDP because it automates the process of deploying applications. This helps you to ensure a reliable and efficient development process. By following best practices and using the right tools for your team and environments, you can create a scalable, robust Kubernetes platform that empowers your development teams to deliver cost-efficient, secure and reliable applications quickly and consistently.
