cicd-chaos

===

This is the code repo for the Gremlin Conf CI/CD Pipeline and Chaos Experiments workshop. The sectoion below will guide you through the different exercises in this workshop

Technologies

• CircleCI
• Gremlin
• DigitalOcean Kubernetes
• Scan (Open Source Security tool)

Workshop Outline

There are two exercises in this workshop:

• Exercise 1: Build Simple CI/CD Pipeline on CircleCI
• Exercise 2: Applying Chaos concepts into CI/CD

Exercise 1

In this exercise you'll learn the basics of the config.yml and how to build a CI/CD pipeline in the CircleCI platform.

Exercise 1 Outline

• Setup Project Environment Variables
• Clone GitHub Repository
• Connect repo with CircleCI
• Create Project Environment Variables
• Config.yml Walkthrough
• Commit + Push Code
• Automated Tests - Unit Tests
• Scan Application for Vulnerabilities
• Build Docker Image
• Scan Docker Image

Setup Project Environment Variables

This CI/CD pipeline integrates with multiple systems which required access to those systems. CircleCI enables secure capture and assignment of sensitive data and credentials. In this project we're connecting to multiple systems and services which requires you to create Environment Variables so create the following environment variables using the CircleCI Platform. All of the values for these environment variables will be supplied to you from the workshop instructors except for the USER_NAME variable which you must define using only lower case characters and numbers. Setup the environment variables using these instructions:

• DIGITAL_CLUSTER_NAME
• DIGITAL_OCEAN_TOKEN
• GREMLIN_API_KEY
• GREMLIN_TEAM_ID
• USER_NAME (Value of your choosing MUST be lowercase character and numbers)

Hello World config.yml

This repo starts with the config.yml that hosts a simple pipeline example called hello world. It is a simple build that basically echos the string "Hello World". It's intended to demonstrate a very simple example of a CircleCI pipeline file.

Clone this Repo

Clone this repo locally

Connect this repo to CircleCI

Sign-up for CircleCI and connect this project to your CircleC Account

Exercise 1 config.yml

CircleCI only executes the config.yml found in the .circleci/ directory which means that you'll have to modify the config.yml found in the .circleci/ directory with the content found in the ex1_config.yml file found in the pipeline-configs/ directory.

You can copy and paste the contents from the ex1_config.yml into the .circleci/config.yml file or you can run the ex1_to_config.sh script which copies the exercise 1 file into the appropriate directory. To use the script run this command from the root of this repo (Linux or MacOS):

./ex1_to_config.sh

Trigger the Exercise 1 Pipeline on CircleCI

Which ever copy method you chose you must run a git commit & git push of the modified .circleci/config.yml in order for CircleCI to execute the Exercise 1 CI/Cd pipeline. Once the git push is executed you can observe your build execute the directives inside the config.yml file.

Exercise 1 Summary

In this exercise you learned about CircleCI config.yml files and how to create useful environment variables used to integrate external services into your pipeline build jobs.

Exercise 2

In this exercise you'll learn how to apply Chaos Engineering into CI/CD pipelines. Chaos Engineering are thoughtful, planned experiments designed to reveal weakness in our systems. Today, we will use Gremlin for our Chaos Engineering experiments. Gremlin provides you with the framework to safely, securely, and simply simulate real outages with an ever-growing library of attacks. A Gremlin account will be provided for you, if you would like to create your own, feel free to sign up via here..

To implement Chaos Engineering, one should follow the scientific method to implement experiments:

1. Observe Your System
2. Baseline your metrics
3. Form a Hypothesis with Abort Conditions
4. Define Blast Radius
5. Run Experiment
6. Analyze Results
7. Expand Scope and Re-Test
8. Share Results

By implementing Chaos Engineering Experiments into your CI/CD pipeline you are automating experiments. Chaos Engineering Automation is the practice of implementing Chaos Engineering Experiments in a continuous way to prevent regression into past failures.

In this exercise we will have a chance to implement two chaos engineering experiments while observing an expanding the blast radius.

Exercise 2 config.yml

CircleCI only executes the config.yml found in the .circleci/ directory which means that you'll have to modify the config.yml found in the .circleci/ directory with the content found in the ex2_config.yml file found in the pipeline-configs/ directory.

You can copy and paste the contents from the ex2_config.yml into the .circleci/config.yml file or you can run the ex2_to_config.sh script which copies the exercise 1 file into the appropriate directory. To use the script run this command from the root of this repo (Linux or MacOS):

./ex2_to_config.sh

You can see the two chaos engineering experiments we will unleash via chaos-experiments/experiment1.sh and chaos-experiments/experiment2.sh. This leverages Gremlin's API, you can see the other API calls you can make via our example or use Gremlin API Examples

Trigger the Exercise 2 Pipeline on CircleCI

Which ever copy method you chose you must run a git commit & git push of the modified .circleci/config.yml in order for CircleCI to execute the Exercise 1 CI/Cd pipeline. Once the git push is executed you can observe your build execute the directives inside the config.yml file.

Exercise 2 Summary

In this exercise you learned about CircleCI config.yml files and how to integrate Chaos experiments into your CI/CD pipelines.

Exercise 3

Injecting Latency