Using Virtual Clusters for Development and CI/CD Workflows

Lukas Gentele
Loft Team
3 min read

#Chapter 1: Virtual Clusters for Dev & CI/CD Workflows.

  • Kostis presents on Virtual Clusters for development & CI/CD workflows, discussing 3 personas & 4 demos. He encourages questions & believes there are no stupid questions.

#Chapter 2: Benefits of Clusters for Developers, System Admins, and Team Leads.

  • Clusters offer benefits for developers, system admins, and team leads. Developers prefer automation and CLIs, admins focus on velocity, and team leads care about overall processes. Clusters can help with quick and efficient deployment.

#Chapter 3: Benefits of Virtual Clusters.

  • Virtual clusters are becoming popular in cloud computing, often faster than digital classes.
  • Used for dev environments, multi-tenancy, testing different cluster versions, and cost savings.

#Chapter 4: Love the Dashboard: Quickly Create Virtual Clusters.

  • Love the Dashboard enables developers to quickly create virtual clusters with a UI or CLI, administrators can customize security, and operators/SREs can use Helm/Terraform for infrastructure as code.

#Chapter 5: Using terraform with virtual clusters.

  • Loft created a provider for virtual clusters, compatible with Loft 2x and 3x, composed of 3 components.
  • Teraform is a DSL used to describe what needs to happen, allowing operators to create/delete clusters with a single command.
  • An example of terraform with virtual clusters can be found in a public GitHub repository.

#Chapter 6: Benefits of using Codefresh.

  • Codefresh has 3 modules: CI, CD, and Githubs; it builds Kirimas and pushes it to a Docker Registry
  • Codefresh has a special settings screen to install infrastructure without credentials in pipelines
  • Codefresh can create multiple clusters in 15 seconds and verify them, faster than using Terraform alone.

#Chapter 7: Streamlining the application creation process.

  • Developers need to create an inventory of resources to create a new application/microservice, which can be a lengthy process.
  • Using a GitHub-style workflow, developers can quickly and easily create a new service and pipelines.
  • Terraform plan can be used to show what will happen if the pull request is merged, and pipelines can be used to destroy clusters.

#Chapter 8: Creating a project in one step.

  • Meeting discussed creating a project in one step using a single button, script or file.
  • GitHub repo, clusters, deployment pipeline, bootstrap process, and master pipeline in Codefresh needed.
  • Demo showed one cluster, Docker Hub connection, empty environment dashboard in Codefresh, and starter repo.

#Chapter 9: Setting up a DevOps environment.

  • Meeting to discuss scenario of developer requesting everything needed to create an app
  • Created 3 clusters, manifests, pipelines, admin privileges, CodeFresh aware of clusters, new GitHub repo & CodeFresh project for developers.

#Chapter 10: Automating application deployment with Loft.

  • Developers can deploy applications quickly and easily with a standard pipeline and Loft templates
  • Process is stored in git, takes 5 mins and no tickets/lengthy processes needed
  • Pre-install apps in clusters, Loft API for automation, better security with isolated template.

#Chapter 11: Discussion on Docker Registries, clusters, and V-Cluster.

  • Discussed use of Docker Registries, clusters, load balancers, and other tools for managing applications
  • Explored managing everything with Terraform and the benefits of using V-Cluster in production
  • Shared resources for learning more about V-Cluster and recording of meeting available on LinkedIn Live.

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