Release Lifecycle Management

The Release Lifecycle Management tools run pre- and post-deployment tasks and checks for your existing cloud-native deployments to make them more robust. This tutorial introduces these tools.

This tutorial assumes you have already completed the Getting started with Keptn Observability exercise. Please ensure you’ve finished that before attempting this guide.

Keptn Pre and Post Deployment Tasks

When Keptn is successfully monitoring your deployments, it can also run arbitrary tasks and SLO evaluations:

• pre-deployment (before the pod is scheduled) and
• post-deployment (after the post is scheduled)

Pre and post deployments can also run on a KeptnApp level. See annotations to KeptnApp

Prerequisites: Deploy webhook sink

During this exercise, you will configure Keptn to trigger a webhook before and after a deployment has successfully completed.

For demo purposes, a place is required to send those request. Install the open source webhook.site tool now.

This will provide a place, on cluster, to send (and view) web requests.

Note: If you have your own endpoint, you can skip this step.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webhooksite/webhook.site/master/kubernetes/namespace.yml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webhooksite/webhook.site/master/kubernetes/redis.deployment.yml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webhooksite/webhook.site/master/kubernetes/laravel-echo-server.deployment.yml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webhooksite/webhook.site/master/kubernetes/webhook.deployment.yml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webhooksite/webhook.site/master/kubernetes/service.yml

Wait until all pods are running in the webhook namespace then port-forward and view the webhook sink page:

kubectl -n webhook wait --for=condition=Ready pods --all
kubectl -n webhook port-forward svc/webhook 8084

Open a browser and go to http://localhost:8084

You should see a page like this with a unique URL (your ID will be different).

Make a note of that unique URL.

Verify Webhook Sink

Open a new browser table and go to your unique URL. The page should remain blank, but when toggling back to http://localhost:8084, you should see a new entry.

Every request sent to that unique URL will be logged here.

Add a Post Deployment Task

Add a task which will trigger after a deployment.

Change UUID to whatever value you have. Apply this manifest:

{% include “lifecycle-management.md_1.yaml” %}

Verify it works

Verify that the KeptnTaskDefinition above actually works.

Trigger an on-demand task execution to verify that the job and pod function correctly.

In the following steps we will have Keptn orchestrate this for us automatically.

Apply this manifest:

{% include “lifecycle-management.md_2.yaml” %}

If it works, kubectl -n keptndemo get jobs should show:

NAME                  COMPLETIONS   DURATION   AGE
runsendevent1-*****   1/1           6s         2m

kubectl -n keptndemo get pods will show the successfully executed pod.

The webhook sync should show this:

Incidentally, this is exactly how you can use Keptn with applications deployed outside of Kubernetes.

Note: If you want to trigger this multiple times, you must change the KeptnTask name.

For example, by changing runsendevent1 to runsendevent2

Ask Keptn to trigger task after Deployment

Annotate the demo application Deployment manifest to have Keptn automatically trigger the task after every deployment.

Recall the Deployment from the Observability Getting started guide.

Add a new label so the labels section looks like this:

{% include “lifecycle-management.md_3.yaml” %}

Increase the version number to 0.0.2 and re-apply the manifest.

Here is a full version of the new YAML:

{% include “lifecycle-management.md_4.yaml” %}

Best Practice: Start with post deployment tasks. Pre-deployment tasks can potentially block deployments (see below).

What Happens Next?

1. The deployment will be applied
2. When the pods are running, Keptn will automatically create a KeptnTask resource for version 0.0.2 of this KeptnApp
3. The KeptnTask will create a Kubernetes Job
4. The Kubernetes Job will create a Pod
5. The pod will run curl and send a new event to the event sink

Pre-deployment Tasks

Keptn Tasks can also be executed pre-deployment (before the pods are scheduled). Do this by using the keptn.sh/pre-deployment-tasks label.

Note: If a pre-deployment task fails, the pod will remain in a Pending state.

Further Information

There is a lot more you can do with KeptnTasks. See pre and post deployment checks page to find out more.

What’s next?

Keptn can also run pre and post deployment SLO evaluations.

Continue the Keptn learning journey by adding evaluations.