We are going to run through the process of keeping multiple installations of OpenFaaS Cloud up to date, configured and logically separated. These examples and processes are just as useful if you are managing one installation or many.

There are several excellent blog posts and resources on setting up OpenFaaS Cloud, but so far upgrades are on you, and each user has been applying their own techniques to keep up to date.

If you’re new to OpenFaaS Cloud, start with one of the tutorials below:

• Create your own private cloud with OpenFaaS Cloud
• Build your own OpenFaaS Cloud with AWS EKS
• How I built Good First Issue bot with OpenFaaS Cloud
• Introducing OpenFaaS Cloud with GitLab

Upgrades are always hard

Upgrading a system is often harder than an initial installation or bootstrap. How do you migrate data and handle breaking changes in the system, or in its dependencies? Where do you store the configuration? How about confidential configuration like secrets?

I’ll outline a technique used with a customer to manage 10 different environments without any additional changes to the ofc-bootstrap tooling. Longer term, a helm chart that is in development for OpenFaaS Cloud should make the whole process easier and allow for tooling such as FluxCD to do some of the heavy lifting.

Bill of materials

To follow along you will need the following things:

• ofc-bootstrap installed (Instructions in link)
• A Keybase account (optional, but highly recommended for keeping secrets encrypted)
• A Domain (We use ofc.example.com, replace this with your domain) managed by one of the supported providers (We are using AWS Route35)
• A set of credentials for AWS for ECR and Route53. (One for each)
• the ofc-bootstrap github repository checked out.

Installing OpenFaaS Cloud

The recommended installation method for OpenFaaS Cloud (OFC) is ofc-bootstrap. It’s a CLI that automates most of the configuration and installation of the OFC core components.

ofc-bootstrap packages a number of primitives such as an IngressController, a way to obtain certificates from LetsEncrypt, the OpenFaaS Cloud components, OpenFaaS itself and Minio for build log storage. Each component is interchangeable.

A relatively long YAML file is used to configure the installation. The developers have tried to strike a balance between sane defaults and having the right knobs and dials in place. Most of the settings will not need to be changed, or only need to be changed at the beginning of the setup.

The kind of configuration you’ll find is around feature toggles, TLS, DNS, Docker registry configuration, and SCM (GitHub/GitLab) settings.

ofc-bootstrap makes installation and management much easier than installing all these comoponents manually.

You can create multiple config files and “override” the config in some files with more specific settings. This means we can create a base set of config that all of our clusters are going to share and pop this config into one file, then re-use this file over and over with our new clusters.

Setting our base config

We need to work out what the slow moving “base” config for our installations is going to be. In general, things like TLS config, the locations of your secrets files and OAuth settings are not likely to change between installations and upgrades, so it’s useful to keep one set of these somewhere and build on this base config with specifics for each cluster.

This gist is the first part of our init.yaml config file, we define the secrets a little later on. This file should be placed in the root of your project.

One extra “trick” I have found useful is defining all of our secrets as “files” rather than directly storing them in the config. This allows us to reduce repetition even more, and keep our config files as small as possible. One extra benifit is that we can use an encrypted git repository, we used keybase’s encrypted git repositories.

This means defining our secrets like this:

  - name: basic-auth
    files:
      - name: "basic-auth-user"
        value_from: "./credentials/basic-auth-user"
      - name: "basic-auth-password"
        value_from: "./credentials/basic-auth-password"

This files syntax grabs the values from the specified file from a relative path. This means we can lay out our directory structure like this:

- project
  - production 
    - cluster0
      - credentials
        - basic-auth-password
        - basic-auth-user
  - dev
    - cluster0
      - credentials
        - basic-auth-password
        - basic-auth-user

Each of these credentials directories is an encrypted keybase git repository. This allows us to limit the access of these secrets to the minimum set of people, while still allowing the rest of your organisation to see your OFC versions, setup and config.

Add the contents of this gist to your init.yaml to use this layout.

When setting up the secrets you can create these credentials directories using the following command, from within each “cluster” directory.

# move into the first production cluster directory
cd project/production/cluster0

# add the encrypted keybase repository
git submodule add keybase://private/[keybase_username]/prod-cluster0 credentials

# Repeat for each cluster as required.

A full copy of this init.yaml file is shown in this gist , you can download this and change your specific values where indicated.

Setting up secrets

Next up is populating the base secrets, ones that are not specific to your individual cluster’s configuration. Things like the OpenFaaS Gateway password that need to be set, but should be random.

I have been using the following set of commands, on linux, to populate the base secrets for each cluster we are going to install into.

Note: We are using AWS ECR for storing docker containers, you can also use the Docker Hub, but that is not covered in this post.

</dev/urandom tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' | head -c 25 > credentials/basic-auth-password
</dev/urandom tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' | head -c 25 > credentials/payload-secret
echo "admin" > credentials/basic-auth-user
ofc-bootstrap registry-login --ecr --account-id <AWS_ACCOUNT_ID> --region <AWS_REGION>

We are also using a customers file rather than a public url. This was released in version 0.9.2 of ofc-bootstrap so make sure you are up to date to support these settings.

# You can also manually edit this file to add more users/teams. 
# One line per user/team. (case sensitive)
echo "YourGithubUsernameOrTeam" > credentials/customers

Each line in this file permits the Github user or team to subscribe to the app and create workloads. Be sure to only add people you need to give access to in this list.

Populate ./credentials/route53-secret-access-key with the route53 secret key only, no whitespace and no prefix

Populate ./credentials/aws-ecr-credentialswith the below format

[default]
aws_access_key_id = <ECR_ACCESS_KEY>
aws_secret_access_key = <ECR_SECRET_KEY>

Setup Github

We are using the OpenFaaS Cloud Github integration to manage our team’s code deployments, this means creating a Github App. There is a useful helper built into ofc-bootstrap that helps speed up the process.

# change into the ofc-bootstrap repository you have checked out
ofc-bootstrap create-github-app --root-domain ofc.example.com --name my-ofc-app

Follow the on-screen instructions:

This will generate a github app. The settings for that app will be printed to the console where you ran the create-github-app command. We need to save some output into new secrets files:

• Save the github-webhook-secret to a file called ./credentials/github-webhook-secret
• Save the private-key into a file called ./credentials/github-private-key.pem, making sure there is no additional whitespace in the file (all lines should start on first column of the file)
• Make a note of the github app_id that is returned, ours was 59246

While we are on github, go to your app, this is the apps list page. Click edit

On this page, there is a checkbox indicating that the app is “Active”. Make sure this is checked, and then save the changes.

---

Next up is creating an OAuth app to secure our private endpoints, such as the OpenFaaS Cloud dashboard.

This is covered in this section of the OpenFaaS Cloud docs. In the interest of not repeating ourselves, you should follow those instructions to create a Github OAuth app.

We need two bits of config from the OAuth app:

• Populate ./credentials/of-client-secret with the client secret from OAuth app
• Make a note of the Oauth client_id, ours was b2a2adc6c56864c9d65d

---

We are almost done with setup I promise! We now just need to populate an overrides.yaml file. This file will contain all the application specific config for that cluster.

Save this overrides.yml file into each of your cluster directories and amend the values for your setup.

### Docker registry
registry: <AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>.dkr.ecr.<AWS_ECR_REGION>.amazonaws.com/<CLUSTER_NAME>

ecr_config:
  ### The region to use for ECR
  ecr_region: "<AWS_ECR_REGION>"

### Your root DNS domain name, this can be a sub-domain i.e. staging.o6s.io / prod.o6s.io
# Should be less than 53 chars, due to the limit on CN length on LetsEncrypt Certs
root_domain: "ofc.example.com"

## Populate from GitHub App
github:
  app_id: "59246" # This is the GitHub app id from earlier


tls_config:
  acess_key_id: <AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID_ROUTE53>


## Populate from OAuth App
oauth:
  client_id: "b2a2adc6c56864c9d65d" # This is the OAuth app client secret from before

## Branch that OpenFaaS Cloud will build and deploy
## You should change this if you want a different branch to be built and deployed instead of master
build_branch: master

Final preparation

The last thing we need to do to get started is symlink the scripts and templates directories from the checked out copy of the ofc-bootstrap repository. This is because the ofc-bootstrap binary requires the contents of these files when deploying OpenFaaS Cloud. There is now a work-in-progress OpenFaaS Cloud Helm chart that should reduce the dependancy on these files.

# For our custer0 in the production environment:
cd production/cluster0

ln -s <path_to_templates_folder> templates
ln -s <path_to_scripts_folder> scripts

Note: If you are planning on running this in a CI pipeline, copy those folders in rather than symlinking so the files are available in the CI environment.

Deploying OpenFaaS Cloud

We should now have a directory structure like this for each of our clusters. The credentials directory stores our secrets and our overrides.yaml holds the cluster specific config.

├── credentials
│   ├── aws-ecr-credentials
│   ├── basic-auth-password
│   ├── basic-auth-user
│   ├── config.json
│   ├── customers
│   ├── github-private-key.pem
│   ├── github-webhook-secret
│   ├── of-client-secret
│   ├── payload-secret
│   └── route53-secret-access-key
├── overrides.yaml
├── scripts
│   ├── (contents not shown)
└── templates
    ├── (contents not shown)

Our top level structure looks like this.

- project
  - production 
    - cluster0
  - dev
    - cluster0

We are going to deploy dev/cluster0 to version 0.13.7 , then go through upgrading the system by changing the OpenFaaS Cloud version in our base init.yaml to 0.13.8 and re-running our command.

Our init.yaml base config file should be placed in the project directory, and each cluster’s overrides.yaml in the relevant cluster directory, like this:

- project
  init.yaml
  - production 
    - cluster0
      overrides.yaml
  - dev
    - cluster0
      overrides.yaml

Navigate into the dev/cluster0 directory and connect to your dev/cluster0 Kubernetes cluster in your shell.

To deploy OpenFaaS Cloud using our config use this command. Remember to set the absolute path to your init.yaml

ofc-bootstrap apply -f <path-to-init.yaml> -f overrides.yaml

After running this, there will be a load of output which ends with something like this (your speed will vary based on network connection speed etc)

Plan completed in 82.859371 seconds 

Our cluster has been initialised. You need to set your DNS records for the following subdomains to the IP or LoadBalancer DNS record for your cluster.

• *.ofc.example.com
• auth.system.ofc.example.com

Once these are set you should be able to navigate to https://system.ofc.example.com and authorise with the github OAuth app. You will then be redirected to the OpenFaaS Cloud Dashboard. It might take a few minutes for the TLS certificates to be issued by LEtsEncrypt, so you may have to wait for this to complete.

Re running the ofc-bootstrap tool

When you have completed everything up to now and verified your installation, you are ready to build and deploy your services!

We are going to run through how to upgrade to OpenFaaS Cloud 0.13.8.

Go to your init.yaml file, find the line openfaas_cloud_version: 0.13.7, change the version to 0.13.8

Re-run the ofc-bootstrap command and wait for it to complete.

ofc-bootstrap apply -f <path-to-init.yaml> -f overrides.yaml

It’s as simple as that. This will re-install the core services and bring the OpenFaaS Cloud installation up to the specified version.

Watch out for

• If you change one of those credentials/* files, this way of re-running ofc-bootstrap will not update that secret. You will either have to delete the secret (not recommended) and re-run the command or you can manually update the base64 encoded value in the secret by using kubectl edit.

• This solution assumes every installation will be updated to the specified OpenFaaS Cloud version specified in your init.yaml. To combat this you could move this config setting into the overrides.yaml. Additionally, using a symlink to ofc-bootstrap’s checked out git repository for the templates and scripts folders assumes you are using the same version of ofc-bootstrap for every cluster too.

• LetsEncrypt has rate limits for new certificates. You may exhaust this limit if you have many clusters. You could reduce the impact of this by using multiple domains or by using the staging issuer on some clusters.

• When you update to a new version of OpenFaaS Cloud using ofc-bootstrap you need to make sure the installed ofc-bootstrap version matches the version of the repository you have checked out (so those templates and scripts folders get updated)

Running in a CI Pipeline

You may wish to keep your Git repository as the single source of truth. This can be done by setting a CI pipeline to run on changes to the master branch for your config. This means your users can’t manually run the ofc-bootstrap tool and everything has to go through git.

You will need to work out how your CI pipeline gets access to the secrets in the credentials folder for each cluster. This will depend on your specific setup, you could use Hashicorp Vault, a solution with Keybase or AWS Secrets Manager.

This solution can be run in your favourite CI pipeline as long as the environment it’s run in can connect to the correct Kubernetes cluster, has access to those credentials, templates and scripts folders.

Once you have those dependencies setup in your CI pipeline, you need to just run the same command that we used earlier.

Make sure you are in the correct directory for the cluster you are connected to and run the following in your CI step

ofc-bootstrap apply -f <path-to-init.yaml> -f overrides.yaml

Over to you

I’ve introduced you to one of the ways I was able to implement continuous deployment for a client, however it’s not the only valid approach and I’d be open to feedback. As part of the customer project, changes were suggested that went into the open source tooling to improve the GitHub automation, to remove Tiller and to switch to Helm3, and to create base and override files.

If you have other solutions, or would like to help us test the new helm chart, please connect with the community.

• Create your own private cloud with OpenFaaS Cloud
• Apply for free access to the managed Community Cluster

Alistair Hey

Former Core Team @openfaas. Cloud native Platform Engineer.

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