Deploy more advanced applications

This tutorial guides you through the steps to deploy more complex applications on the Avassa Platform. It adds on to the basic single-container, multi-site deployment covered in the first application tutorial.

It covers more features related to multi-container applications, and more advanced options related to edge application placement. It introduces the usage of the Strongbox distributed key-value store to manage application credentials.

If you did run through the previous tutorial, it is a good start to make sure you have deleted those application and deployment specifications.

All the code and artifacts used in the example are available in our public gitlab repository.

Check the status of the sites

To inspect the status of the sites, click Sites, and pick a site.

In the top you will see a status of the site as such. In the middle you see a list of all hosts on the site, in this case only one. And finally after selecting a host you will get information about the host.

Label sites for deployment

Containers are deployed based on site-label matching. You are going to place the popcorn-controller application on the sites located in Europe only, so you need to add a label to the Electric Cinema - London site.

Click Sites, pick Electric Cinema - London, and choose edit by clicking the pen (edit) icon top right. Click New label and add a label named region with value europe.

Register the applications

To deploy applications, you need to register the following for each application:

• An application specification that defines the structure and content of an application
• A deployment specification that defines where the application shall be deployed

In this tutorial we define two applications:

• A very simple popcorn-controller application consisting of a single container kettle-popper-manager that manages all the popcorn machines in the theaters it is deployed in. This is the same application as in the previous tutorial. We will show a different way to add it through a YAML spec.
• A more complex theater-room-manager application with two services:
  • A projector-operation service consisting of two containers projector-operations and digital-assets-manager
  • A curtain-controller service consisting of a single curtain-controller container

Click Applications in the sidebar and click Add.

Paste the following into the YAML form field and click Submit to add the popcorn-controllerapplication.

name: popcorn-controller
version: "1.0"
services:
  - name: popcorn-controller-service
    containers:
      - name: kettle-popper-manager
        image: "registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/kettle-popper-manager:v1.0"
    mode: replicated
    replicas: 1

Go back and click Add again and paste the following into the YAML form field and click Submit to add the theater-room-managerapplication.

name: theater-room-manager
version: "1.0"
services:
  - name: theater-operations
    share-pid-namespace: false
    variables:
      - name: OPERATIONS_USERNAME
        value-from-vault-secret:
          vault: operations
          secret: credentials
          key: username
    containers:
      - name: projector-operations
        image: registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/projector-operations:v1.0
        on-mounted-file-change:
          restart: true
      - name: digital-assets-manager
        image: registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/digital-assets-manager:v1.0
        mounts:
          - volume-name: credentials
            mount-path: /credentials
        env:
          USERNAME: ${OPERATIONS_USERNAME}
        on-mounted-file-change:
          restart: true
    mode: replicated
    replicas: 1
    volumes:
      - name: credentials
        vault-secret:
          vault: operations
          secret: credentials
  - name: curtain-controller
    share-pid-namespace: false
    containers:
      - name: curtain-controller
        image: registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/curtain-controller:v1.0
        on-mounted-file-change:
          restart: true
    mode: replicated
    replicas: 1

You should now have two applications in your list:

If you read through the YAML specification of the theater-room-manager application you can see references to "secrets" and "credentials". This example illustrates the distribution of secrets to the applications on the edge sites. In the Control Tower you can create "vaults", each vault in turn can have several secret stores. Each store, finally, manages key/value pairs. Avassa makes sure these secrets are distributed to the right edge applications in a secure way.

A brief introduction to secret follows here. The environment variable OPERATIONS_USERNAMEwill pick a value from vault:operations, secret:credentials, key:username. Further down you can see that the container projector-operationswill mount the secrets as files, one file per key/value pair.

Add a distributed vault for credentials

To distribute credentials through the distributed encrypted key-value store, you must first create a named vault with a key-value map to store the username and password-pair.

Click Secrets in the sidebar, then click Create new vault.

Name the vault operations. Make sure that you select Distribute to all. Now, add a new secrets map named credentials, add two key-value pairs username: the-user, and password: the-password in the data section. Finally, save the new vault.

The state should look like:

Deploy the applications

Click Deployments in the sidebar, and click Add.

Replace the default content in form field with the following and click Submit to deploy the theater-room-manager application on sites designated to be of type system which is all sites except the one running Control Tower.

name: theater-room-manager-deployment
application: theater-room-manager
application-version: "*"
placement:
  match-site-labels: >
    system/type = edge

And create the other deployment as well. Click Register new deployment again and replace the default content with the following and click Submit to deploy the popcorn-controller application to all sites you labeled to be in the Europe region.

name: popcorn-deployment
application: popcorn-controller
application-version: "1.0"
placement:
  match-site-labels: >
    region = europe

The theater-room-manager is now deployed to all sites, and the popcorn-controller application is deployed to electric-cinema based on label matching region = europe.

Your list of deployments should now look like:

Check the status of the deployments

To inspect the status of the deployments select each one to the left and click view

Note well the version field. In the deployments above yo referred to a specific version of the application.

As discussed above you can also inspect the run-time state of the application status as such: either by clicking the site link in the deployment or by navigation from the applications menu.

Update the container version in an application

To update the version of a container that is part of an application, you need to update the version tag on the service, and the image tag on the specific container in the service.

Click Applications in the sidebar, select theater-room-manager, and click the ✏️ icon to edit.

Replace the current application specification with the following updated content and click Submit to trigger an update of the projector-operations container from tag v1.0 to v2.0 in all deployed instances of the theater-room-manager application. The lines that have been changed from the previous version are highlighted below.

name: theater-room-manager
version: "1.1"
services:
  - name: theater-operations
    share-pid-namespace: false
    variables:
      - name: OPERATIONS_USERNAME
        value-from-vault-secret:
          vault: operations
          secret: credentials
          key: username
    containers:
      - name: projector-operations
        image: registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/projector-operations:v2.0
        on-mounted-file-change:
          restart: true
      - name: digital-assets-manager
        image: registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/digital-assets-manager:v1.0
        mounts:
          - volume-name: credentials
            mount-path: /credentials
        env:
          USERNAME: ${OPERATIONS_USERNAME}
        on-mounted-file-change:
          restart: true
    mode: replicated
    replicas: 1
    volumes:
      - name: credentials
        vault-secret:
          vault: operations
          secret: credentials
  - name: curtain-controller
    share-pid-namespace: false
    containers:
      - name: curtain-controller
        image: registry.gitlab.com/avassa-public/movie-theaters-demo/curtain-controller:v1.0
        on-mounted-file-change:
          restart: true
    mode: replicated
    replicas: 1

This created a new version 1.1 of the application specification. 1.0is still available for use. In your deployment you have two options when it comes to application versions:

• always run latest, specify *in the version field
• reference explicit version

This triggers an update of the version on the matching edge sites. This is an illustration of the declarative mechanisms in Avassa. You do not have to perform explicit imperative actions. The application and deployment specifications are constantly matched as desired state versus the actual state on the edge sites. Any discrepancy will make the Avassa system to perform minimum operations to have the desired state move towards desired state. This greatly simplifies operations and integrations to CI/CD environments. You just have to update the application or deployment specification and things happen.

If you know check the deployment details you will see version 1.1. (If you are quick you will see the 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade happen in the UI)

Check the status of the updated application

To inspect the status of the updated applications, click Applications, select theater-room-manager. Click the 👁 icon (view) in the top right if you are still in editing mode.

The 1.1 version in each site row tells you that the deployment has been updated according to the new application specification.

Undeploy the applications

To remove all instances of an application you need to remove their matching deployment specifications.

Click Deployments in the sidebar, and for each deployment, select the Delete deployment menu item.

Conclusion

You have now deployed, updated and undeployed one simple and one complex application across different sets of sites, using label-matching for placement and using a distributed, encrypted key-value store for application credentials.