f5devcentral/techxchange-gitops-lab

GitOps TechXchange Lab

Objective: Deploy an application in F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) Managed Kubernetes that uses NGINX Ingress Controller (Plus edition) with XC Load Balancer ingress.

Prerequisites

Each student needs:

• A GitHub account
• A remote desktop client

Environment Preconditions

• App Stack is installed in AWS as a Managed Kubernetes node
• ArgoCD is installed via automation
• ArgoCD Load Balancer and Origin Pool is created via automation
• Grafana Load Balancer and Origin Pool is created via automation
• Student and volt-ic namespaces are created in the cluster
• F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) Ingress Secret is created in volt-ic namespace in the cluster
• NGINX container registry pull secret is created in student namespace in the cluster

Utilities Needed in UDF Blueprint (already installed for you)

• jq
• yq
• gh (github cli)
• kubectl (v1.25.9)
• curl
• gomplate

UDF Blueprint

For this lab, use the Terraform Modular Demo Framework UDF blueprint.

Lab guide

Begin Lab

techxchange-gitops-lab's Issues

Canary Lab scenario not working with XC

The canary scenario at docs/canary.md contrives a situation where 10% of the traffic should receive 500 errors. For some reason, these errors are appearing in NGINX occasionally via metrics and the NGINX Plus dashboard. However, when using a tool like HEY or cUrl, through the XC LB, these errors aren't appearing. They appear occasionally when using these tools against the NIC service directly, so the problem must be downstream.

Remove TODO: placeholders in lab docs

Currently, the lab guide has various placeholders for namespaces, URLs, etc. Need to replace these with guidance once we finalize how a student can find these items.

Lab needs to use a 1-node cluster

The lab currently spins up a 3-node cluster, which is overkill.

CC: @piyerf5

Need to set up lab bootstrapping in UDF jumphost VM

In the Jumphost VM, need to set up a script (or systemctl unit) to run the terraform necessary to create the entire lab environment. This bootstrapping also needs to output the xc namespace and AppStack CE site name to that the student can update their manifests to begin the lab.

Need to remove HTTPS Auto Cert Load Balancers

Currently, the lab makes use of HTTPS auto-certs (minted real-time by Let's Encrypt). This takes time, and more importantly, there is a limit on how many can be created per day/domain. Need to update this to use a custom certificate and DNS name.

NOTE: This not only needs to be changed in the _templates/manifests and _templates/charts, but also the Terraform that runs to set up the lab, which is located here: https://github.com/mjmenger/expensive.food/blob/gitops-lab/gitops-lab/xc_loadbalancer.tf