Udacity Cloud DevOps Engineer - Capstone Project

Steps in Completing Your Project

Step 1: Propose and Scope the Project

Plan what your pipeline will look like.
Decide which options you will include in your Continuous Integration phase. Use either Circle CI or Jenkins.
Pick a deployment type - either rolling deployment or blue/green deployment.
For the Docker application you can either use an application which you come up with, or use an open-source application pulled from the Internet, or if you have no idea, you can use an Nginx “Hello World, my name is (student name)” application.

• Docker application: Flask app at app.py
• Rolling Deployment type
• Continuous Integration using Circle CI
• Plan what the pipeline will look like

Pipeline steps:

• Install dependencies
• Lint the application with hadolint
• Build a docker image
• Push the docker image to AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
• Deploy Kubernetes using AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Step 2: Use CircleCI, and implement blue/green or rolling deployment.

Set up your CircleCI account and connect your git repository.
Set up your environment to which you will deploy code.

• Git repository connected to CircleCI
• Setup environment variables for CircleCI:
  • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
  • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
  • AWS_ACCOUNT_ID
  • AWS_DEFAULT_REGION
  • AWS_ECR_REGISTRY_ID
  • ECR_REPO_NAME

Step 3: Pick AWS Kubernetes as a Service, or build your own Kubernetes cluster.

Use Ansible or CloudFormation to build your “infrastructure”; i.e., the Kubernetes Cluster.
It should create the EC2 instances (if you are building your own), set the correct networking settings, and deploy software to these instances.
As a final step, the Kubernetes cluster will need to be initialized. The Kubernetes cluster initialization can either be done by hand, or with Ansible/Cloudformation at the student’s discretion.

• Use AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for provisioning a Kubernetes cluster.

Used eksctl with the following command to deploy an EKS cluster:

eksctl create cluster \
    --name longnv43-capstone \
    --version 1.24 \
    --nodegroup-name standard-workers \
    --node-type t3.medium \
    --nodes 1 \
    --nodes-min 1 \
    --nodes-max 2 \
    --region ap-southeast-1 \
    --zones ap-southeast-1a \
    --zones ap-southeast-1b \
    --zones ap-southeast-1c

EKS Cluster

CloudFormation stacks for EKS

EC2 Instance for EKS node

Step 4: Build your pipeline

Construct your pipeline in your GitHub repository.
Set up all the steps that your pipeline will include.
Configure a deployment pipeline.
Include your Dockerfile/source code in the Git repository.
Include with your Linting step both a failed Linting screenshot and a successful Linting screenshot to show the Linter working properly.

• Pipeline in GitHub repository
• Set up all the steps that your pipeline will include.
• Deployment pipeline at CircleCI Config
• Include your Dockerfile/source code in the Git repository.
• Include with your Linting step both a failed Linting screenshot and a successful Linting screenshot to show the Linter working properly.

Linting

Failed lint Passed lint

Step 5: Test your pipeline

Perform builds on your pipeline.
Verify that your pipeline works as you designed it.
Take a screenshot of the Circle CI or Jenkins pipeline showing deployment, and a screenshot of your AWS EC2 page showing the newly created (for blue/green) or modified (for rolling) instances. Make sure you name your instances differently between blue and green deployments.

Container image repository

Pipeline builds

Deployments to Kubernetes cluster

Initial deployment Updated deployment