ClowdApp Workflow

Deploying a ClowdApp with new changes should be easy, repeatable, and timely. In order to make the Clowder experience smoother, there are a few tools to know and a suggested workflow to follow.

In our general experience, you’ll need to make edits to a Clowdapp and your source code as you work through your Clowder migration. The workflow will generally follow this pattern:

  1. Make a change in the source code or Clowdapp

  2. Deploy the new changes locally

  3. Observe the change

  4. Repeat

1. Making local changes

Step 1 is pretty case by case basis. Maybe your config is reading the wrong variable. Perhaps your ClowdApp is missing a Kafka topic. Whatever your changes may be, update the code and go on to step 2.

2. Deploy locally with Bonfire

Bonfire is a cli tool used to deploy apps with Clowder. Bonfire comes with a local config option that we’ll use to drop our ClowdApp into our minikube cluster. Read about getting started with bonfire on ephemeral environments here

We’ll use our examples from Getting Started again. First, let’s make a custom config for our ClowdApp so that bonfire can deploy it without us needing to push any configuration into app-interface.

Type bonfire config edit and add the following to the 'apps' section:

apps:
- name: jumpstart
  host: local
  repo: /path/to/your/git/repo
  path: clowdapp.yml
  parameters:
    IMAGE: quay.io/psav/clowder-hello

This config instructs bonfire to fetch the template for your application from a git repo located on local disk.

Let’s refer back to our example app from earlier. Now, instead of using a base ClowdApp, we will use a Template.

Note: if your previous ClowdApp is still running in the jumpstart namespace, use oc delete app jumpstart to remove it.

Save clowdapp.yml in your git repo’s folder:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Template
metadata:
  name: jumpstart
objects:
- apiVersion: cloud.redhat.com/v1alpha1
  kind: ClowdApp
  metadata:
    name: hello
    namespace: jumpstart
  spec:

    # The bulk of your App. This is where your running apps will live
    deployments:
    - name: app
      # Creates services based on the ports set in ClowdEnv
      webServices:
        public: true
        private: false
        metrics: true
      # Give details about your running pod
      podSpec:
        image: ${IMAGE}:${IMAGE_TAG}

    # The name of the ClowdEnvironment providing the services
    envName: ${ENV_NAME}

    # Request kafka topics for your application here
    kafkaTopics:
      - replicas: 3
        partitions: 64
        topicName: topicOne

    # Creates a database if local mode, or uses RDS in production
    database:
      # Must specify both a name and a major postgres version
      name: jumpstart-db
      version: 12

parameters:
  - name: IMAGE
    value: quay.io/psav/clowder-hello
  - name: IMAGE_TAG
    value: latest
  - name: ENV_NAME
    required: true

Now run:

bonfire deploy jumpstart -n jumpstart

3. Observe the changes

Run kubectl get app -n jumpstart to verify the jumpstart app has been deployed.

If the deployment fails to reach a 'ready' state or pods fail to come up, use kubectl get events -n jumpstart and look for any errors related to your ClowdApp. You can also use kubectl logs <pod name> -n jumpstart --previous=true if your pods are crash looping.

4. Repeat

Repeat until you’re happy with the results. When satisfied, checkout the migration guide to start your app on the jouney to ephemeral and beyond.

Next Steps

Migrating a service from v3 to Clowder