Trial Sandbox User Guide
User Guide for ISD for Argo Trial Sandbox
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User Guide for ISD for Argo Trial Sandbox
Last updated
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This document is the user guide for OpsMx Intelligent Software Delivery (ISD) platform for Argo trial sandbox.
If you have not yet signed up for the ISD for Argo trial sandbox, click here to sign up. After sign-up you will receive an email with the credentials to log in.
Log in to the ISD for Argo Trial Sandbox.
Note: During trial, please reach out to us at opsmxtrialhelp@opsmx.io for assistance.
The ISD-Argo trial instance comes with two Argo CD instances (refer to the image below)
read-write Argo CD instance
read-only Argo CD instance
Note: Adding external customer Argo is not allowed in the Trial Sandbox. The Sandbox is a shared instance and for customer privacy, we don't support adding new instances through the Agent in this environment.
After you login into the ISD-Argo Trial sandbox, you will see the Application Dashboard with the Argo CD instances connected, and the sample applications that each of these instances preloaded with.
Each of these Argo CD instances has three sample applications each, which will help you to explore the following features of ISD-Argo.
Enhanced Visibility Across Entire Argo CD Instances: In-depth visibility into the deployments managed by multiple Argo CD instances with the unified application dashboard.
Delivery Insights Across Entire Argo CD Instances: The deployment insights like deployment frequency, most active applications, fastest deployments and other useful metrics.
Comprehensive Deployments Audits: The history of your deployments. Comprehensive audit of deployments that can be stored per your organization requirement to help security audit.
Progressive Delivery of Applications with Argo Rollouts: An use case to explore the Progressive Delivery of Applications. By the end of this topic, you will learn how to roll out an application using Argo CD and Argo Rollouts.
Automated Analysis during Rollouts: An use case to explore the Automated Analysis during Rollouts. By the end of this topic, you will learn how to enable and trigger Automated Analysis during Rollouts.
Application Deployment using Helm Chart: An use case to explore the deployment of an application using Helm Chart. By the end of this topic you will learn how to deploy an application to the Kubernetes cluster using a Helm Chart.
Create your own Application: An use case that will help you to learn how to create your own application through our ISD UI.
Connect your Argo CD to ISD: An use case that will help you learn how to connect an existing CD instance to ISD.
Read-write instance (read-write-qa) allows you to create new applications or edit and sync applications. The following three sample applications belong to the read-write instance.
sample-rollouts-app: It is an app that showcases progressive delivery using Argo CD and Argo Rollouts. Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. Argo Rollouts provides advanced deployment capabilities such as blue-green, canary, canary analysis, experimentation, and progressive delivery features to Kubernetes.
sample-automated-analysis: The OpsMx Intelligent Software Delivery (ISD) platform integrates with Argo Rollout to automate the verification of deployments and reduce the risk of releasing faulty updates to production through progressive delivery. This sample app makes use of ISD Automated Analysis along with Argo CD and Argo Rollouts.
sample-helm-deploy-app: It is an app that deploys an example hello-world Helm Chart to the target Kubernetes cluster. Helm Chart is a packaging tool for Kubernetes. It packages all of your disparate manifests as a singular object to advertise to your cluster.
Read-Only instance (read-only-prod) is provided for you to have applications with sample data for you to review. This also shows you our ability to enforce RBAC across multiple Argo CDs per desired configuration.
The following three sample apps which are labelled as read-only are the same apps listed above but these apps are for your reference only and you can not make any changes to these apps. You can explore these apps by clicking on the app name.
rollouts-demo-read-only: It is a sample read-only app that showcases progressive delivery using Argo CD and Argo Rollouts.
automated-analysis-demo-read-only: It is a sample read-only app makes use of ISD Automated Analysis along with Argo CD and Argo Rollouts to automate the verification of deployments and reduce the risk of releasing faulty updates to production through progressive delivery.
helm-deploy-demo-read-only: It is a sample read-only app that deploys an example hello-world Helm Chart to the target Kubernetes cluster.
The OpsMx ISD platform offers in-depth visibility into the deployments managed by multiple Argo CD instances with the unified application dashboard. With this platform, teams can easily see which applications are deployed where, when changes were made, and what triggered the new deployment. This centralized view of deployment status across all Argo CD instances can be incredibly valuable for teams deploying microservices applications in a multi-cluster environment.
ISD platform provides insights about the development team through its built-in DORA metrics dashboard. The deployment insights dashboard provides critical information for a DevOps manager or development manager around the state of their software development process including DORA metrics - deployment frequency and other useful metrics.
To see the “Delivery Insights” click on the “Insights” tab from the top menu.
For detailed information on Delivery Insights, refer here.
ISD platform provides a comprehensive audit of deployments that can be stored per your organization requirement (up to 18 months) to help security audit. Deployments Audit page shows you the history of your deployments such as the total number of deployments (during a specific time period), start time and end time of a particular deployment, duration of that deployment, source and revision, etc.
To see the Deployments Audit, click on the “Audit” in the top menu.
For detailed information on Deployments Audit, refer here.
Argo Rollout provides many deployment strategies to help for a safer application rollout including blue-green, canary, experimentation, and progressive delivery. Progressive delivery of applications is key to ensuring the blast radius of a bad update in production is minimal. In progressive delivery, the traffic to the new version is gradually increased while analyzing the behavior of the new version. If the new version meets the expectation, it is fully deployed. If not, Argo Rollout will roll back the changes to the current baseline version.
The “sample-rollouts-app” app showcases progressive delivery using Argo CD and Argo Rollouts. Follow the steps below to explore this sample application.
Click on the “sample-rollouts-app” application from the ISD application dashboard. Refer to the image below.
The “Application Status” page appears. Click on the “rollout” object from the deployment hierarchy as shown in the image below.
Click on the “MORE” tab from the pop-up window. Now you will see the Argo rollout dashboard extension which is available with ISD. This rollout uses “Canary” as a deployment strategy. In a canary rollout, the operator releases a new version of their application to a small percentage of the production traffic. There are two types of steps used in this rollout. The “Set Weight” step is used to define the percentage of traffic released to the new version. The “Pause” is a step used to define the duration between two steps. Refer to the image below.
Now let us trigger the rollouts. Generally, changes in the manifest files stored in Git trigger a rollout. Since it is a demo, let us edit the live manifest from ISD UI. To do so, click on “SUMMARY” and scroll down to “LIVE MANIFEST” and then click on the “EDIT” button. Refer to the image below.
Make some changes in the manifest file and click the “SAVE” button. For example, let us say we change the image file from “argoproj/rollouts-demo:blue” to “argoproj/rollouts-demo:green”. If it is already “green” in the image name, you can change it to “blue” and vice versa. Refer to the images below. You can also change the steps in the rollouts or the replicas. For example, change the weight in the second “Set Weight” Step to 30 or change the replicas to 4.
Once you click the “SAVE” button, the rollout triggers. You can observe that in the “SUMMARY” page. In the below image you can see that the STATUS is changed to “OutOfSync” and HEALTH is changed to “Progressing”.
Now click on the “More” tab. You can see a new Revision is created and the pods in the Revisions are being updated according to the strategy. Refer to the image below. For example in the below image, the first step says “Set Weight” is 10%. That means 10% of the pods will be in the new version and the remaining 90% of the pods will be in the older version. Based on the defined pause duration, the rollout pauses for 1 minute in this example and then continues to the next step.
Once the rollout completes, all the pods are updated to the new version. You can see all the pods in the new revision in the below image.