CICD on OpenShift Part One

I have successfully migrated ‘Dilbert’ from EC2 instance to OpenShift. Dilbert is an automation bot that we use to offload some daily operations. In this article, I will show you how it works.

In the Dilbert project, I have one build configuration.  For each version, I only build once. This to ensure only one binary for each version. There The two deployment configurations: one for UAT environment (Bot Name: Raymond), the other is for PROD environment (Bot Name: Dilbert). They both are generated by script from the same template, the only thing that the script changes is the specific configuration for each environment, like configmap name.

This is the CICD workflow: commit > build image > deploy to UAT (Raymond) > test UAT (Raymond) > deploy to PROD (Dilbert)

Lets check the current running version of both environments. They are both version v0.19.

Now, let me commit a change to see what is going to happen.

Commit a change to add a ping test.

A new build has been triggered.

A successful build triggered a new deployment to UAT (Raymond).

Now it is time to check with Raymond. The running version becomes v0.20. And Raymond responds to my Ping test.

I am happy with my new commit, and I want it to run in PROD. All I need to do is to promote the release-4 to PROD.

Lets check with Dilbert to see the difference. It is v0.20 now too. You may notice that Dilbert responds twice to my question ‘version’, that is because the deployment was doing rolling upgrade, spin up a new instance, and wait for it is ready, then terminate the old instance.

Isn’t mazing? With container technology, build and deployment are becoming so efficient. I have a command ‘how old are you’ to check how long the instance has been running. Let’s have a look – the new image was built at 10:02:14, the new instance was created at 10:03:38, so it is only takes 1 min and 24 seconds to deploy a new version!!

As a thumb of rule, you should always have more than one way to release your codes. Imagine now I want to roll back my change in PROD, and due to some unknown reasons Bamboo suddenly becomes unavailable.

No worries, I have got it covered. I am still able to do a new deployment from terminal on my laptop.

Let’s do a new deployment to roll Dilbert back to v0.19.

v0.19 is back now. By looking at the release number, I know it was not deployed from Bamboo this time 😉

In my next post, I will explain in details how the thing works.