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Define a simple CD pipeline with Knative

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In this blog post, I describe how to set up a simple CD pipeline using the Knative pipeline.

By Andrea Frittoli
Published March 4, 2019

In this blog post, I describe how to set up a simple CD pipeline using Knative pipeline. The pipeline takes a Helm chart from a git repository and performs the following steps:

  • It builds three Docker images by using Kaniko.
  • It pushes the built images to a private container registry.
  • It deploys the chart against a Kubernetes cluster.

I used IBM Cloud™, both the container service IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) and the IBM Container Registry, to host Knative as well as the deployed Health app. I used the same IKS Kubernetes cluster to run the Knative service as well as the deployed application. They are separated by using dedicated namespaces, service accounts, and roles. For details about setting up Knative on IBM Cloud, check out my previous blog post. The whole code is available on GitHub. This post was originally published at andreafrittoli.me on Feb 6th, 2019.

Knative pipelines

Pipelines are the newest addition to the Knative project, which already included three components: serving, eventing, and build. Quoting from the official README, “The Pipeline CRD provides k8s-style resources for declaring CI/CD-style pipelines”. The pipeline CRD is meant as a replacement for the build CRD. The build-pipeline project introduces a few new custom resource definitions (CRDs) to extend the Kubernetes API:

  • tasks
  • tasksrun
  • pipeline
  • pipelinerun
  • pipelineresource

A pipeline is made of tasks; tasks can have input and output pipelineresources. The output of a task can be the input of another one. A taskrun is used run a single task. It binds the task inputs and outputs to specific pipelineresources. Similarly, a pipelinerun is used to run a pipeline. It binds the pipeline inputs and outputs to specific pipelineresources. For more details on Knative pipeline CRDs, see the official project documentation.

The “Health” application

The application deployed by the helm chart is OpenStack Health, or simply “Health,” a dashboard to visualize CI test results. The chart deploys three components:

  • An SQL backend that uses the postgres:alpine docker image, plus a custom database image that runs database migrations through an init container.
  • A python based API server, which exposes the data in the SQL database via HTTP based API.
  • A javascript front end, which interacts on client side with the HTTP API.

openstack health

The OpenStack Health dashboard

The continuous delivery pipeline

The pipeline for “Health” uses two different tasks and several type of pipelineresources: git, image, and cluster. In the diagram below, circles represent resources, boxes represent tasks:

continuous deliver pipeline

As of today, the execution of tasks is strictly sequential; the order of execution is that specified in the pipeline. The plan is to use inputs and outputs to define task dependencies and thus a graph of execution, which would allow for independent tasks to run in parallel.

Source to image (task)

The docker files and the helm chart for “Health” are hosted in the same git repository. The git resource is thus input to the both the source-to-image task, for the docker images, as well as the helm-deploy one, for the helm chart.

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: PipelineResource
metadata:
  name: health-helm-git-knative
spec:
  type: git
  params:
    - name: revision
      value: knative
    - name: url
      value: https://github.com/afrittoli/health-helm

When a resource of type git is used as an input to a task, the Knative controller clones the git repository and prepares it at the specified revision, ready for the task to use it. The source-to-image task uses Kaniko to build the specified Dockerfile and to pushes the resulting container image to the container registry.

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: source-to-image
spec:
  inputs:
    resources:
      - name: workspace
        type: git
    params:
      - name: pathToDockerFile
        description: The path to the dockerfile to build (relative to the context)
        default: Dockerfile
      - name: pathToContext
        description:
          The path to the build context, used by Kaniko - within the workspace
          (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko#kaniko-build-contexts).
          The git clone directory is set by the GIT init container which setup
          the git input resource - see https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/blob/master/pkg/reconciler/v1alpha1/taskrun/resources/pod.go#L107
        default: .
  outputs:
    resources:
      - name: builtImage
        type: image
  steps:
    - name: build-and-push
      image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor
      command:
        - /kaniko/executor
      args:
        - --dockerfile=${inputs.params.pathToDockerFile}
        - --destination=${outputs.resources.builtImage.url}
        - --context=/workspace/workspace/${inputs.params.pathToContext}

The destination URL of the image is defined in the image output resource, and then pulled into the args passed to the Kaniko container. At the moment of writing the image output resource is only used to hold the target URL. In the future Knative will enforce that every task that defines image as an output actually produces the container images and pushes it to the expected location, it will also enrich the resource metadata with the digest of the pushed image, for consuming tasks to use. The health chart includes three docker images; identically three image pipeline resources are required. They are very similar to each other in their definition, only the target URL changes. One of the three:

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: PipelineResource
metadata:
  name: health-api-image
spec:
  type: image
  params:
    - name: url
      description: The target URL
      value: registry.ng.bluemix.net/andreaf/health-api

Helm deploy (task)

The three source-to-image tasks build and push three images to the container registry. They don’t report the digest of the image, however. They associate the latest tag to that digest, which allows the helm-deploy task to pull the right images, assuming only one CD pipeline runs at the time. The helm-deploy has five inputs: one git resource to get the helm chart, three image resources that correspond to three docker files, and finally a cluster resource, that gives the task access to a Kubernetes cluster where to deploy the helm chart to:

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: PipelineResource
metadata
  name: cluster-name
spec:
  type: cluster
  params:
    - name: url
      value: https://host_and_port_of_cluster_master
    - name: username
      value: health-admin
  secrets:
    - fieldName: token
      secretKey: tokenKey
      secretName: cluster-name-secrets
    - fieldName: cadata
      secretKey: cadataKey
      secretName: cluster-name-secrets

The resource name highlighted on line 4 must match the cluster name. The username is that of a service account that has enough rights to deploy helm to the cluster. For isolation, I defined a namespace in the target cluster called health. Both helm itself, as well as the health chart, are deployed in that namespace only. Helm runs with a service account health-admin that can only access the health namespace. The manifests required to set up the namespace, the service accounts, the roles and role bindings are available on GitHub. The health-admin service account token and the cluser CA certificate should not be stored in git. They are defined in a secret, which can be setup using the following template:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: __CLUSTER_NAME__-secrets
type: Opaque
data:
  cadataKey: __CA_DATA_KEY__
  tokenKey: __TOKEN_KEY__

The template can be filled in with a simple bash script. The script works after a successful login was performed via ibmcloud login and ibmcloud target.

CLUSTER_NAME=${TARGET_CLUSTER_NAME:-af-pipelines}
eval $(ibmcloud cs cluster-config $CLUSTER_NAME --export)

# This works as long as config returns one cluster and one user
SERVICE_ACCOUNT_SECRET_NAME=$(kubectl get serviceaccount/health-admin -n health -o jsonpath='{.secrets[0].name}')
CA_DATA=$(kubectl get secret/$SERVICE_ACCOUNT_SECRET_NAME -n health -o jsonpath='{.data.ca\.crt}')
TOKEN=$(kubectl get secret/$SERVICE_ACCOUNT_SECRET_NAME -n health -o jsonpath='{.data.token}')

sed -e 's/__CLUSTER_NAME__'/"$CLUSTER_NAME"'/g' \
    -e 's/__CA_DATA_KEY__/'"$CA_DATA"'/g' \
    -e 's/__TOKEN_KEY__/'"$TOKEN"'/g' cluster-secrets.yaml.template > ${CLUSTER_NAME}-secrets.yaml

Once a cluster resource is used as input to a task, it generates a kubeconfig file that can be used in the task to perform actions against the cluster. The helm-deploy task takes the image URLs from the image input resources and passes them to the helm command as set values; it also overrides the image tags to latest. The image pull policy is set to always since the tag doesn’t change, but the image does. The upgrade --install command is required so that both the first as well as following deploys may work.

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: helm-deploy
spec:
  serviceAccount: health-helm
  inputs:
    resources:
      - name: chart
        type: git
      - name: api-image
        type: image
      - name: frontend-image
        type: image
      - name: database-image
        type: image
      - name: target-cluster
        type: cluster
    params:
      - name: pathToHelmCharts
        description: Path to the helm charts within the repo
        default: .
      - name: clusterIngressHost
        description: Fully qualified hostname of the cluster ingress
      - name: targetNamespace
        description: Namespace in the target cluster we want to deploy to
        default: "default"
  steps:
    - name: helm-deploy
      image: alpine/helm
      args:
        - upgrade
        - --debug
        - --install
        - --namespace=${inputs.params.targetNamespace}
        - health # Helm release name
        - /workspace/chart/${inputs.params.pathToHelmCharts}
        # Latest version instead of ${inputs.resources.api-image.version} until #216
        - --set
        - overrideApiImage=${inputs.resources.api-image.url}:latest
        - --set
        - overrideFrontendImage=${inputs.resources.frontend-image.url}:latest
        - --set
        - overrideDatabaseImage=${inputs.resources.database-image.url}:latest
        - --set
        - ingress.enabled=true
        - --set
        - ingress.host=${inputs.params.clusterIngressHost}
        - --set
        - image.pullPolicy=Always
      env:
        - name: "KUBECONFIG"
          value: "/workspace/${inputs.resources.target-cluster.name}/kubeconfig"
        - name: "TILLER_NAMESPACE"
          value: "${inputs.params.targetNamespace}"

The pipeline

The pipeline defines the sequence of tasks that will be executed, with their inputs and outputs. The from syntax can be used to express dependencies between tasks, i.e. input of a tasks is taken from the output of another one.

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: health-helm-cd-pipeline
spec:
  params:
    - name: clusterIngressHost
      description: FQDN of the ingress in the target cluster
    - name: targetNamespace
      description: Namespace in the target cluster we want to deploy to
      default: default
  resources:
    - name: src
      type: git
    - name: api-image
      type: image
    - name: frontend-image
      type: image
    - name: database-image
      type: image
    - name: health-cluster
      type: cluster
  tasks:
  - name: source-to-image-health-api
    taskRef:
      name: source-to-image
    params:
      - name: pathToContext
        value: images/api
    resources:
      inputs:
        - name: workspace
          resource: src
      outputs:
        - name: builtImage
          resource: api-image
  - name: source-to-image-health-frontend
    taskRef:
      name: source-to-image
    params:
      - name: pathToContext
        value: images/frontend
    resources:
      inputs:
        - name: workspace
          resource: src
      outputs:
        - name: builtImage
          resource: frontend-image
  - name: source-to-image-health-database
    taskRef:
      name: source-to-image
    params:
      - name: pathToContext
        value: images/database
    resources:
      inputs:
        - name: workspace
          resource: src
      outputs:
        - name: builtImage
          resource: database-image
  - name: helm-init-target-cluster
    taskRef:
      name: helm-init
    params:
      - name: targetNamespace
        value: "${params.targetNamespace}"
    resources:
      inputs:
        - name: target-cluster
          resource: health-cluster
  - name: helm-deploy-target-cluster
    taskRef:
      name: helm-deploy
    params:
      - name: pathToHelmCharts
        value: .
      - name: clusterIngressHost
        value: "${params.clusterIngressHost}"
      - name: targetNamespace
        value: "${params.targetNamespace}"
    resources:
      inputs:
        - name: chart
          resource: src
        - name: api-image
          resource: api-image
          from:
            - source-to-image-health-api
        - name: frontend-image
          resource: frontend-image
          from:
            - source-to-image-health-frontend
        - name: database-image
          resource: database-image
          from:
            - source-to-image-health-database
        - name: target-cluster
          resource: health-cluster

Tasks can accept parameters, which are specified as part of the pipeline definition. One example in the pipeline above is the ingress domain of the target kubernetes cluster, which is used by the helm chart to set up of ingress of the deployed application. Pipelines can also accept paramters, which are specified as part of the pipelinerun definition. Parameters make it possible to keep environment and run specific values confined to pipelinerun and pipelineresource. You may notice that the pipeline includes an extra task helm-init which is invoked before helm-deploy. As the name suggests, the task initializes helm in the target cluster/namespace. Tasks can have multiple steps, so that could be implemented as a first step within the helm-deploy task. However, I wanted to keep it separated so that helm-init runs using a service account with an admin role in the target namespace, while helm-deploy runs with an unprivileged account.

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: helm-init
spec:
  serviceAccount: health-admin
  inputs:
    resources:
      - name: target-cluster
        type: cluster
    params:
      - name: targetNamespace
        description: Namespace in the target cluster we want to deploy to
        default: "default"
  steps:
    - name: helm-init
      image: alpine/helm
      args:
        - init
        - --service-account=health-admin
        - --wait
      env:
        - name: "KUBECONFIG"
          value: "/workspace/${inputs.resources.target-cluster.name}/kubeconfig"
        - name: "TILLER_NAMESPACE"
          value: "${inputs.params.targetNamespace}"

Running the pipeline

To run a pipeline, a pipelinerun is needed. The pipelinerun binds the tasks inputs and outputs to specific pipelineresources and defines the trigger for the run. At the momement of writing only manual trigger is supported. Since there is no native mechanism available to create a pipelinerun from a template, running a pipeline again requires changing the pipelinerun YAML manifest and applying it to the cluster again. When executed, the pipelinerun controller automatically creates a taskrun when a task is executed. Any kubernetes resources created during the run, such as taskruns, pods and pvcs, stays once the pipelinerun execution is complete; they are cleaned up only when the pipelinerun is deleted.

apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: PipelineRun
metadata:
  generateName: health-helm-cd-pr-
spec:
  pipelineRef:
    name: health-helm-cd-pipeline
  params:
    - name: clusterIngressHost
      value: mycluster.myzone.containers.appdomain.cloud
    - name: targetNamespace
      value: health
  trigger:
    type: manual
  serviceAccount: 'default'
  resources:
    - name: src
      resourceRef:
        name: health-helm-git-mygitreference
    - name: api-image
      resourceRef:
        name: health-api-image
    - name: frontend-image
      resourceRef:
        name: health-frontend-image
    - name: database-image
      resourceRef:
        name: health-database-image
    - name: health-cluster
      resourceRef:
        name: mycluster

To execute the pipeline, all static resources must be created first, and then the pipeline can be executed. Using the code from the GitHub repo:

# Create all static resources
kubectl apply -f pipeline/static

# Define and apply all pipelineresources as described in the blog post
# You will need one git, three images, one cluster.

# Generate and apply the cluster secret
echo $(cd pipeline/secrets; ./prepare-secrets.sh)
kubectl apply -f pipeline/secrets/cluster-secrets.yaml

# Create a pipelinerun based on the demo above and create it
kubectl create -f pipeline/run/run-pipeline-health-helm-cd.yaml

A successful execution of the pipeline will create the following resources in the health namespace:

kubectl get all -n health
NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/health-api-587ff4fcfb-8hmpd        1/1     Running   64         11d
pod/health-frontend-7c77fbc499-r4r6p   1/1     Running   0          11d
pod/health-postgres-5877b6b564-fwzfk   1/1     Running   1          11d
pod/tiller-deploy-5b7c84dbd6-4vcgr     1/1     Running   0          11d

NAME                      TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)          AGE
service/health-api        LoadBalancer   172.21.196.186   169.45.67.202   80:32693/TCP     11d
service/health-frontend   LoadBalancer   172.21.19.234    169.45.67.204   80:30812/TCP     11d
service/health-postgres   LoadBalancer   172.21.3.160     169.45.67.203   5432:32158/TCP   11d
service/tiller-deploy     ClusterIP      172.21.188.81              44134/TCP        11d

NAME                              DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/health-api        1         1         1            1           11d
deployment.apps/health-frontend   1         1         1            1           11d
deployment.apps/health-postgres   1         1         1            1           11d
deployment.apps/tiller-deploy     1         1         1            1           11d

NAME                                         DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/health-api-587ff4fcfb        1         1         1       11d
replicaset.apps/health-frontend-7c77fbc499   1         1         1       11d
replicaset.apps/health-postgres-58759444b6   0         0         0       11d
replicaset.apps/health-postgres-5877b6b564   1         1         1       11d
replicaset.apps/tiller-deploy-5b7c84dbd6     1         1         1       11d

All Knative pipeline resources are visible in the default namepace:

$ kubectl get all
NAME                                                                           READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
pod/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-helm-deploy-target-cluster-pod-649959        0/1     Completed   0          4m
pod/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-helm-init-target-cluster-pod-4da57e          0/1     Completed   0          7m
pod/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-source-to-image-health-api-pod-4f0362        0/1     Completed   0          32m
pod/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-source-to-image-health-database-pod-60b15f   0/1     Completed   0          14m
pod/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-source-to-image-health-frontend-pod-c23e71   0/1     Completed   0          24m

NAME                 TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
service/kubernetes   ClusterIP   172.21.0.1           443/TCP   12d

NAME                                        CREATED AT
task.pipeline.knative.dev/helm-deploy       12d
task.pipeline.knative.dev/helm-init         11d
task.pipeline.knative.dev/source-to-image   12d

NAME                                                                                         CREATED AT
taskrun.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-helm-deploy-target-cluster        4m
taskrun.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-helm-init-target-cluster          7m
taskrun.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-source-to-image-health-api        32m
taskrun.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-source-to-image-health-database   14m
taskrun.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2-source-to-image-health-frontend   24m

NAME                                                    CREATED AT
pipeline.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline   10d

NAME                                                             CREATED AT
pipelinerun.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-cd-pipeline-run-2   32m

NAME                                                          CREATED AT
pipelineresource.pipeline.knative.dev/af-pipelines            12d
pipelineresource.pipeline.knative.dev/health-api-image        12d
pipelineresource.pipeline.knative.dev/health-database-image   12d
pipelineresource.pipeline.knative.dev/health-frontend-image   12d
pipelineresource.pipeline.knative.dev/health-helm-git-knative 12d

To check if the “Health” application is running, you can hit the API using curl:

HEALTH_URL=http://$(kubectl get ingress/health -n health -o jsonpath='{..rules[0].host}')
curl ${HEALTH_URL}/health-api/status

You can point your browser to ${HEALTH_URL}/health-health/# to see the front end.

Conclusions

Even if the project only started at the end of 2018, it is already possible to run a full CD pipeline for a relatively complex Helm chart. It took me only a few small PRs to get everything working fine. There are several limitations to be aware of, however, and the team is well aware of them as we are working quickly towards the resolution. Some examples of the limitations are:

  • Tasks can only be executed sequentially.
  • Images as output resources are not really implemented yet.
  • Triggers are only manual.

There’s plenty of space for contributions, in the form of bugs, documentation, code or even simply sharing your experience with Knative pipelines with the community. A good place to start are the GitHub issues marked as help wanted. All the code I wrote for this blog is available on GitHub under Apache 2.0, so feel free to re-use any of it. Feedback and PRs are welcome.

Caveats

The build-pipeline project is rather new, at the moment of writing the community is working towards its first release. Part of the API may still be subject to backward incompatible changes and examples in this blog post may stop working eventually. See the API compatibility policy for more details.

Next steps

So you mastered how to create a CD pipeline with Knative. Now what? As mentioned above, feel free to provide feedback or PRs on my code. If you want to play around some more with Knative, IBM recently announced Knative support as an experimental managed add-on to our IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

You can also check out our other Knative tutorials and blogs here: https://developer.ibm.com/components/knative/

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