Boosting CI/CD Effectiveness with Red Hat and Coralogix

This is a guest post by Ariel Assaraf, CEO of Coralogix.

Modern software development depends critically on high performance CI/CD. Increasing deployment frequency without adversely affecting stability is the hallmark of a high performing software company.

It’s important to incorporate effective monitoring into your CI/CD solution. In this article, we’ll link together Red Hat tools and Coralogix to propose a flexible, cutting edge continuous delivery solution.

The Tools We’ll be Using

For our proposed architecture, we’re going to tap into some outstanding technologies in the Red Hat arsenal.

OpenShift as our platform

The OpenShift platform was created by Red Hat as a versatile toolset to allow for effective deployment of applications. It has since become the most popular managed Kubernetes solution and has been used across many organizations and industries with continued success.

Kubernetes beneath it all

Kubernetes is the rock upon which OpenShift is built. Developed by Google engineers to enable effortless deployment of applications, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that has claimed a dominant position in open source tooling.

Kubernetes Operators working behind the scenes

Operators are what allow OpenShift to smoothly and effortlessly integrate with other applications. Essentially they are a way of packaging, deploying and managing applications which are Kubernetes-native. Operators are based on the Kubernetes concept of a controller – a software loop that compares the current state of an object with its desired state and tries to make the two match as much as possible.

Tekton for our Deployments

Sitting above Kubernetes is a framework called Tekton. This is an open source project which functions as a universal scaffold for CI/CD tools. It’s built according to industry standard specifications so it can integrate with a range of tools including Jenkins, Jenkins X and Knative. OpenShift uses the Tekton framework as a building material for pipelines and CI/CD tools.

Coralogix for Log Analytics

Coralogix is a SaaS log analytics and cloud security platform that provides a managed ELK stack, adorned with proprietary ML-powered anomaly detection. It allows teams to full real-time monitoring coverage without paying for the noise that their systems generate.

The Proposed Architecture

OpenShift provides a flexible, reliable platform on which to host your applications. Supported by Tekton, this means simple and easy deployment of applications. Basic functionality, such as rollbacks, are automatically available as part of the Tekton tool.

Log Collection is a must

While Kubernetes is capable of hosting an Elasticsearch cluster, the maintenance, patching and monitoring of this cluster takes considerable time and expertise. Coralogix solves this problem with a simple Kubernetes integration and a managed ELK stack. This ELK stack is further enhanced with a great deal of additional features, such as cost optimization for your logs.

The Power of this Architecture

This architecture is simple and effective. It will deliver a quick and easy to use CI/CD solution, but it has a great deal of other hidden benefits.

Collect Crucial DevOps Metrics

Tekton’s resource model makes it trivial to collect and analyze the history of deployments, both failed and successful. Analysis of this data will provide insights into the bottlenecks in your system. The State of DevOps 2019 report indicates four key metrics that trend well with organizational success:

• Mean time to recovery
• Deployment frequency
• Deployment failure rate
• Deployment Lead Time (from commit to production)

Tekton’s stats are all available as part of the PipelineRun resource in OpenShift. The status field contains a wealth of information to dig into. This means, using the OpenShift command line tool and a bit of YAML, you can gather the essential information you need to inspect and adapt your deployment process.

Detect and Rollback Faulty Releases

Tekton comes with all the tools you need to create a self-healing CI/CD system.

Your deployment task can make use of post-deployment checks and issue a rollback if something unexpected happens, by adding your rollback command into the except block of your task. This creates a safe, functional feedback loop that can detect known issues and automatically rollback the faulty issue.

Detect Completely New Issues

Our smoke tests will tell us if one of our features isn’t performing, but it might not be able to tell us if something unknown is happening. For that, you need to be able to benchmark your data against your previous version.

The flexible resources that are declared by Tekton mean we can collect information from any source we like, including from external APIs like Coralogix.

This introduces a whole new world of observability for our CI/CD pipeline. Rather than relying solely on the efficacy of our smoke tests, we can learn the fundamentals of our system and act on unexpected anomalies.

Observability is Key to Continuous Delivery

In order to compete in the modern software market, change is our most important currency. As our rate of change increases, so too must the scope and sophistication of our monitoring system.

By combining the declarative flexibility of OpenShift with the powerful analysis of Coralogix, you can create a CI/CD pipeline that self heals on issues known and unknown and exposes metrics about performance. It can be extended in any direction you like, to ensure that your next deployment is a success.