POC on azure with azure devops, azure portal, aks

Tech stack

• azure devops for CI
• terraform for IAC
• dotnet code 3.0 for REST api
• k8s using aks

Steps to deploy

• Prerequisites
  • Create account on dev.azure.com and portal.azure.com
  • Create Storage account eepoctfstate and container tfstate in portal.azure.com for terraform backend
  • Create Container registry akspochelloworld for docker image
  • Create static IP in resource group MC_firstapp-resources_hello_westus2 and update IP address to ./manifests/helloworld/templates/staticip.yml and ./manifests/helloworld/templates/ingress.yaml
• Create new project on dev.azure.com
• In your project go to pipelines and create new pipeline. In this step you will be required to authorize github and portal.azure.com account to dev.azure.com
• Use build_and_push.yml for build job. This will do following steps on our REST api code base
  • restore dependencies from Nuget
  • run unit tests
  • create artifact for build which is getting used in other jobs (todo: remove dependencies on artifact and remove artifact)
  • build and push docker image to acr
  • package and push helm chart to acr
• Use ./InfraPipelines/create_aks_cluster.yml for creating infrastructure. This will launch an aks cluster on portal.azure.com
• Use deploy.yml for deploying application to aks cluster created earlier. (todo: this step currently does docker build and push and then pull it to aks. Need to remove docker push from here.)
• When not using application you can use ./InfraPipelines/tf_destroy.yml to destroy resources created by ./InfraPipelines/create_aks_cluster.yml and deploy.yml.
• Note that, build_and_push.yml and create_aks_cluster.yml are normal pipelines and can be used directly from git repo. ./InfraPipelines are created as Release pipelie and need to create manually and maintained in dev.azure.com and not in github.

Limitations/TODOs:

• Manually update Environment after every terraform recreate (destroy and apply)
• Figure out best suited vm size in terraform/variables.tf
• Update helm version in Chart.yml with every check-in/build
• update docker image version in helm chart. try to use latest tag instead of specific
• [istio]Add 2 more service and add dependencies in main service
• Add istio to deployments
• automate clusterrole and rolebindings - currently done manually through kubectl commands
• revisit naming of resources
• setup trigger for deploy pipeline
• Code checkout- move to ssh based checkout instead of oauth based
• Create Makefile for helmcharts

Python sript [WIP]

Learnings

Azure deveops

• Has entire project lifecycle tools
  • Azure repo: Source control tool based on git
  • Board: Project management tool
  • Pipeline: CI/CD tool
  • Test Plan: (not available in free version)
  • Artifact:

We covered pipelines in this poc. There are two types of pipelines, normal pipeline (mostly intended for CI) and release pipeline (intended for CD) We have created pipelines build_and_push for build, test code and build and push docker image to Azure Container registry

k8s

aks