cf-deployment

This repo is still a work in progress for certain use cases. Take a look at this table to see if it's recommended that you use it.

Table of Contents

• Purpose
• Is cf-deployment ready to use?
• Deploying CF
• Contributing
• Setup and Prerequisites
• Deploying cf-deployment
• Ops Files
• CI

Purpose

This repo contains a canonical manifest for deploying Cloud Foundry without the use of cf-release, relying instead on individual component releases. It will replace the manifest generation scripts in cf-release when cf-release is deprecated. It uses several newer features of the BOSH director and CLI. Older directors may need to be upgraded and have their configurations extended in order to support cf-deployment.

cf-deployment embodies several opinions about Cloud Foundry deployment. It:

• prioritizes readability and meaning to a human operator. For instance, only necessary configuration is included.
• emphasizes security and production-readiness by default.
  • bosh's --vars-store feature is used to generate strong passwords, certs, and keys. There are no default credentials, even in bosh-lite.
  • TLS/SSL features are enabled on every job which supports TLS.
• uses three AZs, of which two are used to provide redundancy for most instance groups. The third is used only for instance groups that should not have even instance counts, such as etcd and consul.
• uses Diego natively, does not support DEAs, and enables diego-specific features such as ssh access to apps by default.
• deploys jobs to handle platform data persistence using the cf-mysql release for databases and the CAPI release's WebDAV job for blob storage.
• assumes load-balancing will be handled by the IaaS or an external deployment.
• assumes GCP as the default deployment environment. For use with other IaaSs, see the Ops Files section below.

Is cf-deployment ready to use?

Use Case	Is cf-deployment ready?	Blocked On
Test and development	Yes
New production deployments	No	Downtime testing
Existing production deployments using cf-release	No	Migration tools

We've been testing cf-deployment for some time, and many of the development teams in the Cloud Foundry organization are using it for development and testing. If that describes your use case, you can use cf-deployment as your manifest.

If you're hoping to use cf-deployment for a new production deployment, we still wouldn't suggest using cf-deployment. We still need to be able to make some guarantees about app availability during rolling deploys. When we think cf-deployment is ready, we'll update this section and make announcements on the cf-dev mailing list.

Migrating from cf-release: The Release Integration team is still working on developing a migration path from cf-release. This use case is not sufficiently tested yet, and we don't advise anybody to attempt it until we develop the necessary tooling and guide.

Deploying CF

Step 1: Get a BOSH Director

To deploy a BOSH Director to AWS or GCP, use bbl (the Bosh BootLoader). For a full guide to getting set up on GCP, look at this guide.

If you're deploying against a local bosh-lite, you'll need to take the following steps before deploying:

export BOSH_CA_CERT=<PATH-TO-BOSH-LITE-REPO>/ca/certs/ca.crt
bosh -e 192.168.50.4 update-cloud-config bosh-lite/cloud-config.yml

Step 1.5: Get load balancers

For IaaSes like AWS and GCP, you'll need to use bbl to create load balancers as well by running bbl create-lbs.

Step 2: Deploy CF

To deploy to a configured BOSH director using the new bosh CLI:

export SYSTEM_DOMAIN=some-domain.that.you.have
bosh -e my-env -d cf deploy cf-deployment/cf-deployment.yml \
  --vars-store env-repo/deployment-vars.yml \
  -v system_domain=$SYSTEM_DOMAIN \
  [ -o operations/CUSTOMIZATION1 ] \
  [ -o operations/CUSTOMIZATION2 (etc.) ]

The CF Admin credentials will be stored in the file passed to the --vars-store flag (env-repo/deployment.yml in the example). You can find them by searching for uaa_scim_users_admin_password.

If you're using a local bosh-lite, remember to add the operations/bosh-lite.yml ops-file to your deploy command:

bosh -e 192.168.50.4 -d cf deploy cf-deployment.yml \
  -o operations/bosh-lite.yml \
  --vars-store deployment-vars.yml \
  -v system_domain=bosh-lite.com

See the rest of this document for more on the new CLI, deployment vars, and configuring your BOSH director.

Contributing

Although the default branch for the repository is master, we ask that all pull requests be made against the develop branch. Please also take a look at the "style guide", which lays out some guidelines for adding properties or jobs to the deployment manifest.

We ask that pull requests and other changes be successfully deployed, and tested with the latest sha of CATs.

Setup and Prerequisites

cf-deployment relies on newer BOSH features, and requires a bosh director with a valid cloud-config that has been configured with a certificate authority. It also requires the new alpha bosh CLI, which it relies on to generate and fill-in needed variables.

BOSH CLI

cf-deployment requires the new BOSH CLI. It's in alpha, but has features necessary to use cf-deployment.

BOSH cloud-config

cf-deployment assumes that you've uploaded a compatible cloud-config to the BOSH director. The cloud-config produced by bbl is compatible by default, which covers GCP and AWS. For bosh-lite, you can use the cloud-config in the bosh-lite directory of this repo. We have not yet tested cf-deployment against other IaaSes, so you may need to do some engineering work to figure out the right cloud config (and possibly ops files) to get it working for cf-deployment.

Deployment variables and the var-store

cf-deployment.yml requires additional information to provide environment-specific or sensitive configuration such as the system domain and various credentials. To do this we use the --vars-store flag in the new BOSH CLI. This flag takes the name of a yml file that it will read and write to. Where necessary credential values are not present, it will generate new values based on the type information stored in cf-deployment.yml. Variables passed in with -v or -l will override those already in the var store, but will also be stored there for future use. The -v flag is also the recommended mechanism for providing the system domain, which bosh is not equipped to generate.

Ops Files

The configuration of CF represented by cf-deployment.yml is intended to be a workable, secure, fully-featured default. When the need arises to make different configuration choices, we accomplish this with the -o/--ops-file flags. These flags read a single .yml file that details operations to be performed on the manifest before variables are generated and filled. We've supplied some common manifest modifications in the operations directory.

Here's an (alphabetical) summary:

• operations/aws.yml and operations/change-logging-port-for-aws-elb.yml - this file overrides the vm_extensions for load balancers and overrides the loggregator ports to 4443, since it is required under AWS to have a separate port from the standard HTTPS port (443) for loggregator traffic in order to use the AWS load balancer.
• operations/disable-router-tls-termination.yml - this file eliminates keys related to performing tls/ssl termination within the gorouter job. It's useful for deployments where tls termination is performed prior to the gorouter - for instance, on AWS, such termination is commonly done at the ELB. This also eliminates the need to specify ((router_ssl.certificate)) and ((router_ssl.private_key)) in the var files.
• operations/gcp.yml - this file was intentionally left blank and left for backwards compatibility. It previously overrode the static IP addresses assigned to some instance groups, as GCP networking features allow them to all co-exist on the same subnet despite being spread across multiple AZs.
• operations/scale-to-one-az.yml - Scales cf-deployment down to a single instance per instance group, placing them all into a single AZ. Effectively halves the deployment's footprint. Should be applied before other ops files.
• operations/test/add-datadog-firehose-nozzle-aws.yml - Deploys a datadog-firehose-nozzle that collects system metric and posts to datadog. For AWS only.
• operations/tcp-routing-gcp.yml - this ops file adds TCP router and routing api for GCP. Not directly compatible with the use-postgres ops file; see that ops file's entry for details.
• operations/use-postgres.yml - replaces the MySQL instance group with a postgres instance group. Warning: this will lead to total data loss if applied to an existing deployment with MySQL or removed from an existing deployment with postgres. Requires an additional ops file to work with the tcp-routing-gcp ops file. See the next entry for details.
• use-postgres-tcp-routing - builds on tcp-routing-gcp and use-postgres to use the postgres database for TCP routing. Must come after the other two.

CI

The ci for cf-deployment automatically bumps to the latest versions of its component releases on the develop branch. These bumps, along with any other changes made to develop, are deployed to a single long-running environment and tested with CATs before being merged to master if CATs goes green. There is not presently any versioning scheme, or way to correlate which version of CATs is associated with which sha of cf-deployment, other than the history in CI. As cf-deployment matures, we'll address versioning. The configuration for our pipeline can be found here.