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cf-deployment

** This repo is under initial development. This document describes the intended purpose and use of resources in this repo. We don't yet gurantee that this repo lives up to those promises. When we're more confident that we've achieved initial stability, this warning will be removed, and version tagging will be added. We'd love for members of the CF community to try cf-deployment and give us feedback. Github issues welcome. Find us on the #cf-deployment channel in the cloudfoundry Slack **

CI pipeline here

Please make pull requests against the develop branch.

NB: develop is the default branch. master is more stable. Only commits tha that have passed our CI are merged to master.

Purpose

This repo contains a canonical manifest for deploying Cloud Foundry without the use of cf-release, relying instead on individual component releases. It will replace the manifest generation scripts in cf-release when cf-release is deprecated. It uses several newer features of the BOSH director and CLI. Older directors may need to be upgraded and have their configurations extended in order to support cf-deployment.

cf-deployment embodies several opinions about Cloud Foundry deployment. It:

• prioritizes readability and meaning to a human operator.
  • All properties are set in the jobs which use them. Global properties are not used.
  • YAML Anchors with human-friendly names are used where the need for duplication has not yet been obviated by BOSH links.
  • Properties are ordered to maximize navigability and present the most useful and important information first.
  • Only necessary configuration is included. Any release default that can be safely used, is. Any properties which can be consumed via BOSH links, are.
• emphasizes security and production-readiness by default.
  • bosh's --vars-store feature is used to generate strong passwords, certs, and keys. There are no default credentials, even in bosh-lite.
  • TLS/SSL features are enabled on every job which supports TLS.
• uses three AZs, of which two are used to provide redundancy for most instance groups. The third is used only for instance groups that should not have even instance counts, such as etcd and consul.
• uses Diego natively, does not support DEAs, and enables diego-specific features such as ssh access to apps by default.
• deploys jobs to handle platform data persistence using the cf-mysql release for databases and the CAPI release's WebDAV job for blob storage.
• assumes load-balancing will be handled by the IaaS or an external deployment.
• assumes GCP as the default deployment environment. For use with other IaaSs, see the Ops Files section below.

Usage

To deploy to a configured BOSH director using the new bosh CLI:

export SYSTEM_DOMAIN=some-domain.that.you.have
bosh -e my-env -d cf deploy cf-deployment/cf-deployment.yml \
  --vars-store env-repo/deployment-vars.yml \
  -v system_domain=$SYSTEM_DOMAIN \
  [ -o operations/CUSTOMIZATION1 ] [ -o operations/CUSTOMIZATION2 (etc.) ]

See the rest of this document for more on the new CLI, deployment vars, and configuring your BOSH director.

Setup and Prerequisites

cf-deployment relies on newer BOSH features, and requires a bosh director with a valid cloud-config that has been configured with a certificate authority. It also requires the new alpha bosh CLI, which it relies on to generate and fill-in needed variables.

• If you are deploying to GCP, please use gcp-deployment-guide.md, also located in this directory. (bbl support for GCP is coming soon.)
• If you are deploying to AWS, please use bbl, the bosh-bootloader, to prepare your environment.
• If you are deploying to bosh-lite, please see the example below under Deploying to bosh-lite.

BOSH CLI

cf-deployment requires the new BOSH CLI. It's in alpha, but has features necessary to use cf-deployment.

BOSH cloud-config

cf-deployment assumes that you've uploaded a compatible cloud-config to the BOSH director. The cloud-config produced by bbl is compatible by default. For IaaSs not supported by bbl, please refer to our IaaS-specific advice in the Setup and Prerequisites section above. If your IaaS is not listed there, we have not yet tested cf-deployment with it, and you may need to do some engineering work to figure out the right cloud config (and possibly ops files) to get it working for cf-deployment.

Deployment variables and the var-store

cf-deployment.yml requires additional information to provide environment-specific or sensitive configuration such as the system domain and various credentials. To do this we use the --vars-store flag in the new BOSH CLI. This flag takes the name of a yml file that it will read and write to. Where necessary credential values are not present, it will generate new values based on the type information stored in cf-deployment.yml. Variables passed in with -v or -l will override those already in the var store, but will also be stored there for future use. The -v flag is also the recommended mechanism for providing the system domain, which bosh is not equipped to generate.

Ops Files

The configuration of CF represented by cf-deployment.yml is intended to be a workable, secure, fully-featured default. When the need arises to make different configuration choices, we accomplish this with the -o/--ops-file flags. These flags read a single .yml file that details operations to be performed on the manifest before variables are generated and filled. We've supplied some common manifest modifications in the operations directory. Here's a brief summary:

• operations/disable-router-tls-termination.yml - this file eliminates keys related to performing tls/ssl termination within the gorouter job. It's useful for deployments where tls termination is performed prior to the gorouter - for instance, on AWS, such termination is commonly done at the ELB. This also eliminates the need to specify ((router_ssl.certificate)) and ((router_ssl.private_key)) in the var files.
• operations/change-logging-port-for-aws-elb.yml - this file overrides the loggregator ports to 4443, since it is required under AWS to have a separate port from the standard HTTPS port (443) for loggregator traffic in order to use the AWS load balancer.
• operations/gcp.yml - this file overrides the static IP addresses assigned to some instance groups, as GCP networking features allow them to all co-exist on the same subnet despite being spread across multiple AZs.
• operations/tcp-routing-gcp.yml - this ops file adds TCP router and routing api for GCP to CF deployment.

Deploying to bosh-lite

To deploy to bosh-lite:

export BOSH_CA_CERT=$PWD/bosh-lite/ca/certs/ca.crt
bosh -e 192.168.50.4 update-cloud-config bosh-lite/cloud-config.yml
bosh -e 192.168.50.4 -d cf deploy cf-deployment.yml -o operations/bosh-lite.yml --vars-store deployment-vars.yml -v system_domain=bosh-lite.com

Contributing

Changes to cf-deployment should be made on the develop branch. Pull requests should be based on develop, as well.

We ask that pull requests and other changes be successfully deployed, and tested with the latest sha of CATs.

CI

The ci for cf-deployment automatically bumps to the latest versions of its component releases on the develop branch. These bumps, along with any other changes made to develop, are deployed to a single long-running environment and tested with CATs before being merged to master if CATs goes green. There is not presently any versioning scheme, or way to correlate which version of CATs is associated with which sha of cf-deployment, other than the history in CI. As cf-deployment matures, we'll address versioning. The configuration for our pipeline can be found here.

Editorial Style Guide

Please observe the following conventions when contributing to cf-deployment. We are likely to revert/reject commits and PRs which don't. In general, every line of cf-deployment.yml should be clear, necessary for a correctly functioning default deployment, and explicable. Maximizing the legibility and minimizing the size of cf-deployment.yml are high priorities. Features under development and optional extensions should be added/enabled via ops files.

1. Don't use global properties.
2. To maximize the readability of properties that must be set on many jobs, create a clearly named YAML anchor at the first occurrence of the duplicate properties, then reference that anchor as necessary.
3. Duplication and the use of YAML anchors indicate properties which should be provided/consumed by Releases using BOSH links, but aren't yet.
4. Don't include any property in cf-deployment.yml which is not necessary for every user of the default configuration.
5. Don't include any property in cf-deployment.yml for which a usable default exists in the spec of the job's release.
6. Don't include properties in cf-deployment.yml as targets for ops files. Ops files can be used to add needed properties.
7. Any nominally variable property value which can be safely hardcoded in cf-deployment.yml should be. Usernames, for example.
8. Any property value which isn't necessary for every user of the default configuration to specify should be exposed via ops-files, not vars.
9. Properties which must be set to reflect IaaS-sensitive contextual conditions, such as the relationship between networks and AZs, should assume GCP and be set appropriately for other IaaSs in an ops file.
10. Ops files included in the cf-deployment repo should not overlap. That is, they should be order-independent, and not address the same properties. If this is not possible, their order must be documented.
11. All credentials should be bosh-generatable. When adding new passwords, secrets, certs, CAs, and keys, add them to the variables section of the manifest. Use the existing variables as a guide for the details necessary to allow bosh to perform credential generation. When testing new credential properties, test with bosh-generated values.