In the modern software development landscape, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines play a pivotal role in automating the process of building, testing, and deploying applications. In this blog post, we’ll deep dive into the implementation of a robust CI/CD pipeline to deploy applications on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using Google Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy services.
To achieve our goal, we have the following requirements:
- Deployment of two simple Flask applications (app1 & app2) on the GKE clusters.
- Automation of the entire deployment process, triggered by a developer’s code push.
- Dev-cluster deployment precedes production deployment, allowing for review before promoting to the prod-cluster.
This CI/CD pipeline leverages several key components:
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Google’s managed Kubernetes service, providing a scalable and reliable platform for deploying containerized applications.
- Cloud Build: A fully managed continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that allows developers to build, test, and deploy applications on Google Cloud Platform.
- Cloud Deploy: A service for continuous delivery that automates the deployment of containerized applications to Google Kubernetes Engine and other platforms.
- GitHub: A popular version control platform where developers collaborate, manage, and version control their codebase.
We are going to implement the solution using the following steps to implement the CI/CD pipeline for deploying applications on GKE:
- Create two simple Flask applications (app1 & app2).
- Set up a GitHub repository and push the application code.
- Create two GKE clusters: dev-cluster and prod-cluster, using Google Kubernetes Engine.
- Create Kubernetes manifest files in the Kubernetes folder to deploy the application and expose it as a service.
- Create skaffold.yaml file now.
- Now Create cloudbuild.yaml file to build and push docker images to Artifact registry for both application and Configure a Cloud Build trigger to initiate the pipeline upon code push events in the GitHub repository.
- Implement the necessary code to define the Cloud Deploy pipeline and targets for both dev-cluster and prod-cluster.
- Push the updated code to the GitHub repository, triggering the Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy processes.