Template for a repository with multiple services

This template is for a single repository with multiple services that are built and deployed more or less independently. We use Azure devops pipelines for build and deploy automation, and Kubernetes for hosting. Most boilerplate configuration is done and taken care of in this repository, so you should be up to speed with creating and running your thing quite quickly.

What's in the package?

The goal is to have a package with everything needed to get your code running (except of course for your actual program, that you'll have to provide yourself).

If you need help with any of these steps, please reach out on MS Teams.

Build automation

There are configuration files for automated builds of Docker containers, that should require almost no additional configuration. All services that are included in azure-pipelines.yaml will be built, published to our internal Docker registry at socuterna.azurecr.io and make kubernetes specifications available for a release pipeline. The only requirement is that your service has a Dockerfile that describe how it should be built.

Deployment and hosting

The build pipeline contains no automated deployment, however the pipeline in the standard template has some building blocks for simple deploying to our Kubernetes environment:

• The .k8s directory contains templates for a Kubernetes Deployment and Service, the usual building blocks for a service in our cluster.
• The build.yaml template is set up to build a Docker container using your Dockerfile, publish the container to our registry at scouterna.azurecr.io, replace the image tag in the Kubernetes deployment speification and, finally, publish the .k8s directory as a build artifact.

The build artifact can easily be used in a Release Pipeline on Azure Pipelines, to easily deploy the right version of your service to our cluster.

Adding a service

To add a new service, you'll need a few steps:

Contributing to the template

The template is a constantly ongoing work as we learn and improve how we use our tools. The current state is useable, but there are some known areas of improvement:

Build pipelines

The build pipelines still require a little bit too much configuration by default. The goal is that it's enough to add a directory and a reference to that service in one place, and it's all good to go as long as the service can use a default Docker build process.

Currently there's no relase/deploy automation built into the template, this is because the Azure tooling doesn't support configuring those outside the web interface. Or, well, there is a way to add "deploy jobs" to the pipelines configured with files in the repository, but those deploy jobs are far less powerful and structured than the ones added as "release pipelines" in the web interface. So for now we stick to releasing with the web tool.

Kubernetes specifications

This isn't specifically about the template - our entire Kubernetes configuration could benefit from some love. Some possible improvements:

• Start using Helm instead of our homebrew templating solution based on sed.
• Use more security features (network policies, security contexts)