Udacity first project of Cloud Native Application Architecture Nanodegree.
In this project,provided am a platform engineer with the main role to package and deploy the application to a Kubernetes platform. Throughout this project, I have to use Docker to package the application, and automated the Continuous Integration process with GitHub Actions. For the release process, I have used Kubernetes declarative manifests, which were templated using Helm. To automated the Continuous Delivery process, finally used ArgoCD
TechTrends is an online website used as a news sharing platform, that enables consumers to access the latest news within the cloud-native ecosystem. In addition to accessing the available articles, readers are able to create new media articles and share them.
Imagine the following scenario: We joined a small team as a Platform Engineer. The team is composed of 2 developers, 1 platform engineer (you), 1 project manager, and 1 manager. The team was assigned with the TechTrends project, aiming to build a fully functional online news sharing platform. The developers in the team are currently working on the first prototype of the TechTrends website. As a platform engineer, we should package and deploy TechTrends to Kubernetes using a CI/CD pipeline.
The web application is written using the Python Flask framework. It uses SQLite, a lightweight disk-based database to store the submitted articles.
Below we can examine the web application component of the techtrends application:
Additionally, the initial sitemap of the website can be found below:
Where:
-
About page - presents a quick overview of the TechTrends site
-
Index page - contains the content of the main page, with a list of all available posts within TechTrends
-
New Post page - provides a form to submit a new post
-
404 page - is rendered when an article ID does not exist is accessed
And lastly, the first prototype of the application is storing and accessing posts from the "POSTS" SQL table. A post entry contains the post ID (primary key), creation timestamp, title, and content. The "POSTS" table schema can be examined below:
- Apply the best development practices and develop the status and health check endpoints for the TechTrends application.
- Package the TechTrends application by creating a Dockefile and Docker image.
- Implement the Continuous Integration practices, by using GitHub Actions to automate the build and push of the Docker image to DockerHub.
- Construct the Kubernetes declarative manifests to deploy TechTrends to a sandbox namespace within a Kubernetes cluster. The cluster should be provisioned using k3s in a vagrant box.
- Template the Kubernetes manifests using a Helm chart and provide the input configuration files for staging and production environments.
- Implement the Continuous Delivery practices, by deploying the TechTrends application to staging and production environments using ArgoCD and the Helm chart.
- Fork the repository TechTrends application.
- Install Python.
- Install Docker.
- Install Git.
- Install Vagrant.
- Access your techtrends on port.
- Create a GitHub Action to build and push the application
- Deploy a Kubernetes cluster using k3s
- Deploy TechTrends with ArgoCD.
- Create a Helm Chart