gcloud setup gke provisioning pipeline

Setting up a Google Kubernetes Engine provisioning pipeline on Google Cloud

In this section we will create a pipeline which will provision a GKE cluster. This pipeline will be configured to be manually triggered by the user. As part of GKE cluster provisioning, a NGINX Ingress controller is deployed and a file named cluster_info.env is created on a Bucket, which contains, among others, the DNS name of the Ingress controller, that you will need to add as CNAME record on the domains used in your application Ingress manifest files. Refer to the appendix for more details.

The creation of the pipeline will follow the project workflow, so a new branch named feature/gke-provisioning will be created, the YAML file for the pipeline and the Terraform files for creating the cluster will be pushed to it.

Then, a Pull Request (PR) will be created in order to merge the new branch into the appropiate branch (provided in -b flag). The PR will be automatically merged.

The script located at /scripts/pipelines/gcloud/pipeline_generator.sh will automatically create this new branch, create the GKE provisioning pipeline based on the YAML template, and, if it is possible, merge this new branch into the specified branch.

Prerequisites

• Have a Google Cloud project already setup and Google Cloud CLI installed and configured. If it is not the case, please go back to corresponding guide.

• This script will commit and push the corresponding YAML template into your repository, so please be sure your local repository is up-to-date (i.e you have pulled the latest changes with git pull).

Creating the pipeline using provided script

Usage

pipeline_generator.sh \
  -c <config file path> \
  -n <pipeline name> \
  -d <project local path> \
  --gcloud-region <region> \
  [--rancher] \
  [-b <branch>]

Note	The config file for the GKE provisioning pipeline is located at /scripts/pipelines/gcloud/templates/gke/gke-pipeline.cfg.

Flags

-c, --config-file        [Required] Configuration file containing pipeline definition.
-n, --pipeline-name      [Required] Name that will be set to the pipeline.
-d, --local-directory    [Required] Local directory of your project
    --gcloud-region      [Required] Google Cloud region for provisioning resources.
    --rancher                       Install Rancher to manage the cluster.
    --setup-monitoring              Install logging and monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Loki). Default: true.
-b, --target-branch                 Name of the branch to which the Pull Request will target. PR is not created if the flag is not provided.

Example

./pipeline_generator.sh -c ./templates/gke/gke-pipeline.cfg -n gke-provisioning -d C:/Users/$USERNAME/Desktop/project --gcloud-region eu-west-1 --rancher -b develop

Note	Rancher is installed on the cluster after provisioning when using the above command.

Appendix: Interacting with the cluster

Note	Make sure you have kubectl installed.

In order to interact with your cluster you need to be logged in gcloud CLI. In case you are not, execute the following command:

gcloud auth login

Then login to the cluster. After that, you can execute whatever kubectl command.

gcloud container clusters get-credentials <project id>-gke --region=<region> --project=<project id>
kubectl <command>

To get the DNS name of the NGINX Ingress controller on the GKE cluster, navigate into Google Cloud Console > Buckets > gke-test-hangar_cloudbuild/pipelinesArtifacts/gke-provision and look up for the Authenticated URL field in the cluster_info.env file.

Rancher, if installed, will be available on https://<ingress controller domain>/dashboard. You will be asked for an initial password, which can be retrieved with:

kubectl get secret --namespace cattle-system bootstrap-secret -o go-template='{{.data.bootstrapPassword|base64decode}}{{"\n"}}'

=== Appendix: Monitoring

In case of having chosen to install the logging and monitoring stack, refer to the corresponding documentation.

Appendix: Destroying the cluster

To destroy the provisioned resources, go to Google Cloud Console > Triggers and select the gke-provisioning trigger, press run, set operation pipeline variable value to destroy and run the pipeline.