The Univerisity of Chicago - Devops Course

Introduction

This repository has been created as part of the contents for the Devops Course at the The Univerisity of Chicago as an Teacher Assistant.

Assigment

Our company wants to create a marketing campaign to promote the his services. For promoting his services, they've thought to create a new Web Site which will contain the information. They have though on using Wordpress because of the expirience of the development team in that technology. They have requested you to build a new infrastructure to support the development team with the following requirements:

• Install a Wordpress server
• The Database will be MySQL 5.7 and needs to be in hosted infrastructure an not in a managed infrastructure
• Wordpress should use containerized orchestator like Kubernetes to balance high peak of workloads
• The kubernetes infrastructure should be monitored using Prometheus and Grafana
• Test that the solution will be scalable and resilient to the increase of load.
• Use an infrastructure as code approach so the whole project can be redeployed through different environments and quickly.

Important

The execution of the scripts contained in this repository create resources on AWS that are not on the free-tier, so before executing it be aware that you will be charge for them.

Be sure that you review that all reasources have been deleted after the removal of the Stack, as there are some resources that are not deleted automatically after deleting the Cloudformation stack. Like for example: Loadbalancer, EFS FileSystem, Security Groups.

Repositories layout

• The project is divided in 4 different repositories
  • uchicago-cdk: This repository holds the CloudFormation code to create the infrastructure.
  • uchicago-packer: This repository holds the Packer code to generate the AWS AMI Image.
  • uchicago-gitops: This repository holds the Kubernetes manifests to deploy the apps on EKS..
  • uchicago-wordpress: This repository holds the main Makefile file and the configuration to the previous repositories as Git submodules.

Prerequisites

• Installed AWS Cli 2.2.12
• Installed AWS CDK 2.8.0
• Installed Packer 1.7.2
• Installed Kubectl v1.23.1
• Installed Fluxcd 0.28.3
• Installed kubeseal v0.17.2
• Installed yq v4.24.2

Usage of this repository

To be able to use this repository, you need to fork it, instead of clonning

gh repo fork https://github.com/ausias-armesto/uchicago-wordpress --clone
cd uchicago-wordpress
git submodule init
git submodule update

Asumpsions

• It exists an AWS IAM users with enough credentials to create all the required resources
• The Network has been created using default values and no taking care of applying extra security settings.
• The packer image has been created without a monitoring.
• MySQL is using the same disk for the data than for the OS. The volume is created with deletion on the termination of the instance.
• Kubernetes cluster uses many default configurations

Commands

• make check: Cheks that the prerequisites tools are installed.
• make prepare: Prepares the workspace, by installed the required dependencies, build and test resources.
• make create-secrets region=eu-west-1 env=dev: Create secrets on AWS.
• make deploy-network region=eu-west-1 env=dev: Deploy the network infrastructure.
• make create-ami region=eu-west-1 env=dev: Deploy the MySQL packer image.
• make deploy-infrastructure region=eu-west-1 env=dev: Deploy the Wordpress infrastructure with the MySQL EC2 instance and a EKS Cluster.
• make configure-kubernetes env=dev: Configure the $HOME/.kube/config file with a new entry for the cluster created.
• export GITHUB_TOKEN=<my-github-credentials-token>: Export the Credentials token in an environment variable which will be used by Flux
• make flux env=dev: Install all the apps on the Kubernetes cluster (FluxCD, Sealed Secrets, Prometheus, Grafana, Wordpress). Change the ghuser with the name of your Github forked repository user.
• make enable-access-grafana: Enable acces to Grafana
• make enable-access-wordpress: Enable acces to Wordpress
• make load-test-start: Starts injecting load into the wordpress App
• make load-test-stop: Stops injecting load into the wordpress App

flux get all -A
flux suspend helmrelease wordpress -n wordpress && flux resume helmrelease -n wordpress wordpress
flux resume helmrelease -n jenkins jenkins && flux reconcile helmrelease -n jenkins jenkins
kubectl delete ns wordpress
flux install helmrelease wordpress -n wordpress
flux reconcile helmrelease wordpress -n wordpress

Delete Namespace

NAMESPACE=flux-system
kubectl proxy &
kubectl get namespace $NAMESPACE -o json |jq '.spec = {"finalizers":[]}' >temp.json
curl -k -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X PUT --data-binary @temp.json 127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/namespaces/$NAMESPACE/finalize

Access to Grafana:

• url: http://localhost:3000
• username: admin
• password: prom-operator

Access to Wordpress

• url: http://localhost:4000 or http://localhost:4000/wp-admin/
• username: admin
• password: READ FROM AWS SECRET admin-wordpress-uchicago-dev

Load Test

Initialize Kubernetes

In the following image we can see how after starting the load test, the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler has move to different states increasing its size from 1 to 9.

In the AWS AutoScaling group we can see how different activity has been registered into the ASG due to the current workload which has provoked to increase the Kubernetes nodes from 2 to 6.