Deployment with Helm

Keptn uses Helm v3 for deploying onboarded services to a Kubernetes cluster. This is currently implemented in the helm-service. The helm-service supports two deployment strategies explained below:

Direct deployments
Blue-green deployments

The explanation is based on the provided Helm Chart for the carts microservice, see Charts for details.

Direct deployments

If the deployment strategy of a stage in the shipyard is configured as deployment_strategy: direct, Helm deploys a release called sockshop-dev-carts as carts in namespace sockshop-dev.

$ kubectl get deployments -n sockshop-dev carts -owide

NAME    READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE   CONTAINERS   IMAGES                                 SELECTOR
carts   1/1     1            1           56m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.1   app=carts

When sending a new-artifact, we are updating the values.yaml file in the Helm Charts with the respective image name.

Blue-green deployments

If the deployment strategy of a stage in the shipyard is configured as deployment_strategy: blue_green_service, Helm creates two deployments within the Kubernetes cluster: (1) the primary and (2) the canary deployment. This can be inspected using the following command:

$ kubectl get deployments -n sockshop-staging carts carts-primary -owide

NAME            READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE   CONTAINERS   IMAGES                                 SELECTOR
carts-primary   1/1     1            1           56m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.1   app=carts-primary
carts           0/0     0            0            3m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.2   app=carts

When a new artifact is deployed (e.g., 0.11.2), a canary deployment will be modified and scaled up.

NAME            READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE   CONTAINERS   IMAGES                                 SELECTOR
carts-primary   1/1     1            1           57m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.1   app=carts-primary
carts           0/1     1            1            1m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.2   app=carts

The primary deployment is always available (and called carts-primary). The canary deployment (called carts) gets scaled up in the case of a new-artifact event (e.g., in this case someone has sent a new-artifact for 0.11.2). Traffic is shifted to the canary release.

Once testing has finished, the primary deployment is upgraded to the new version (0.11.2).

NAME            READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE   CONTAINERS   IMAGES                                 SELECTOR
carts-primary   1/1     1            1            3m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.2   app=carts-primary
carts           1/1     1            1            1d   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.2   app=carts

After a new pod for the primary deployment has been successfully deployed, traffic is shifted to the primary deployment and the canary deployment is scaled down:

NAME            READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE   CONTAINERS   IMAGES                                 SELECTOR
carts-primary   1/1     1            1            4m   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.2   app=carts-primary
carts           0/0     0            0            1d   carts        docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.11.2   app=carts

Clean-up after deleting a project

When executing keptn delete project, Keptn does not clean up existing deployments nor Helm releases. To do so, delete all relevant namespaces:

For each stage defined the shipyard file, execute kubectl delete namespace PROJECTNAME-STAGENAME, e.g.:

  kubectl delete namespace sockshop-dev
  kubectl delete namespace sockshop-staging
  kubectl delete namespace sockshop-production

Note: This will also delete the corresponding Helm releases, which are stored as Kubernetes secrets in the namespaces.