Deploying to Production

This guide will cover configuration and installation of a production-grade Brigade deployment. If you are looking for a more comprehensive introduction to Brigade or are interested in evaluating Brigade in a local, development-grade cluster, view our QuickStart instead.

• Prerequisites
• Preparation
  • Configure Host Name
  • Configure Passwords
  • Disable the Root User
  • Configure Ingress
  • Configure TLS
  • Configure an Authentication Provider
  • Configure MongoDB
  • Configure ActiveMQ Artemis
  • Configure Shared Storage
  • Other Configuration Options
• Install Brigade
• Update DNS
• Verify the Deployment
  • Install the Brigade CLI
  • Log In
• Wrap-Up
• Deploying Multiple Brigades

Prerequisites

• A remote, production-grade Kubernetes v1.16.0+ cluster. Your cluster must be capable of the following:
  • Provisioning public IPs. (If you’re using a managed Kubernetes service from any prominent cloud provider, for instance, you’re all set.)
  • Provisioning volumes that can be mounted to multiple pods simultaneously over the network. If your cloud provider or Kubernetes distro does not already provide a suitable StorageClass for this purpose, the NFS Server Provisioner chart, although deprecated, provides a viable and popular option.
• Helm v3.7.0+
• kubectl
• Free disk space on the cluster nodes. The installation requires sufficient free disk space and will fail if a cluster node disk is nearly full.

Preparation

1. Enable Helm’s experimental OCI support:

   POSIX

   $ export HELM_EXPERIMENTAL_OCI=1
   

   PowerShell

   > $env:HELM_EXPERIMENTAL_OCI=1
   

2. Extract the default configuration from the Helm chart and save it to a convenient location. In the example below, we save it to ~/brigade-values.yaml. We’ll use that path to refer to that file throughout the remainder of this document, but if you save it to a different location, make the appropriate substitutions wherever you see that path.

$ helm inspect values oci://ghcr.io/brigadecore/brigade \
    --version v2.6.0 > ~/brigade-values.yaml

In the next steps, we’ll edit ~/brigade-values.yaml to configure a production-grade deployment.

Configure Host Name

In the Brigade chart values file (~/brigade-values.yaml), setting apiserver.host has a default value of localhost. This is a suitable value for a non-production deployment of Brigade, but for a variety of reasons, this value should be set correctly for a production-grade deployment of Brigade.

Change the value of apiserver.host to reflect the DNS host name by which end-users will log in via the CLI.

Configure Passwords

In the Brigade chart values file (~/brigade-values.yaml) there is one password with a hard-coded default. For production-grade deployments, it is critical to supply your own value for that field.

Replace the value of mongodb.auth.passwords[0] with a complex string of your own. If you’re personally in the habit of using a password manager and it can generate strong passwords for you, consider using that.

You may optionally supply your own values for the following fields as well:

• apiserver.rootUser.password: If you do not set a value for this, one will be generated on initial install and will not change on subsequent helm upgrade operations unless explicitly overridden.
• mongodb.auth.rootPassword: If you do not set a value for this, one will be generated on initial install and will be regenerated/changed by every subsequent helm upgrade operation unless explicitly overridden. Since you will rarely, if ever, need to use this password, this is generally not a problem.
• artemis.password: If you do not set a value for this, one will be generated on initial install and will not change on subsequent helm upgrade operations unless explicitly overridden.

Disable the Root User

Production-grade Brigade deployments utilize third-party identity providers for authentication. We’ll configure this a little later.

Since Brigade’s default configuration is optimized for getting started very quickly in a local, development-grade cluster, the default configuration does not utilize any third-party identity provider for authentication. Instead, it exposes a single, “root” user that has full administrative privileges.

We highly recommend disabling the root user for production deployments. To do so, set the value of of apiserver.rootUser.enabled to false.

Configure Ingress

The term “ingress” can be overloaded. Although we will discuss Kubernetes Ingress resources below, this section is really about ingress in a more general sense – how traffic reaches Brigade’s API server.

In the default configuration, the API server’s Kubernetes Service is configured as type ClusterIP. This means the API server does not receive a public IP and will therefore not be reachable from outside your Kubernetes cluster.

To make your API server reachable from outside your cluster (e.g. to users of the brig CLI), you must do one of the following:

• Enable Ingress: (Here “ingress” refers to a Kubernetes Ingress resource.) Leave apiserver.service.type set to CLusterIP and change apiserver.ingress.enabled to true. If your ingress controller requires you to decorate your Ingress resources with any controller-specific annotations, add those under apiserver.ingress.annotations.

• Use a LoadBalancer: Leave apiserver.ingress.enabled set to false and change apiserver.service.type to LoadBalancer.

Configure TLS

In a production-grade Brigade deployment, the API server must always secure communication with the API server using TLS. If this is disabled, then the secrecy of user credentials cannot be ensured as requests traverse unsecured networks (e.g. the internet).

In the default configuration, self-signed TLS certificates are auto-generated for the API server during installation. Because self-signed certificates are not trusted, these should be overridden with valid, trusted certificates for production-grade deployments.

How you proceed depends on choices made in the previous section:

• If you are using an ingress controller to route inbound traffic (see previous section), set apiserver.ingress.tls.generateSelfSignedCert to false. Once auto-generation of a cert is disabled, you become responsible for providing the certificate yourself. There are two ways to do this:

  • Provide cert/key material directly by (individually) base64-encoding your PEM encoded certificate and key and adding them, respectively, as the values for apiserver.ingress.tls.cert and apiserver.ingress.tls.key.

  • Alternatively, ensure the existence of a Kubernetes cert Secret resource named <Helm release name>-apiserver-ingres-cert in the same namespace as Brigade. This would typically be brigade-apiserver-ingres-cert in the brigade namespace. How you achieve this is up to you, but an easy and sensible way to accomplish it is through the use of a cert manager.

• If you are not using an ingress controller to route inbound traffic, and instead opted to use a Service of type LoadBalancer (see previous section), set apiserver.tls.generateSelfSignedCert to false. Once auto-generation of a cert is disabled, you become responsible for providing the certificate yourself. There are two ways to do this:

  • Provide cert/key material directly by (individually) base64-encoding your PEM encoded certificate and key and adding them, respectively, as the values for apiserver.tls.cert and apiserver.tls.key.

  • Alternatively, ensure the existence of a Kubernetes cert Secret resource named <Helm release name>-apiserver-cert in the same namespace as Brigade. This would typically be brigade-apiserver-cert in the brigade namespace. How you achieve this is up to you, but an easy and sensible way to accomplish it is through the use of a cert manager.

Configure an Authentication Provider

Production-grade Brigade deployments utilize third-party identity providers for authentication. Any identity provider that supports OpenID Connect should work. Brigade has been verified to work with Azure Active Directory and Google Identity Platform. GitHub does not implement OpenID Connect, but is also supported due to its popularity.

• For identity providers that support OpenID Connect, set apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.strategy to oidc, then set each of the following to values provided by your identity provider:

  • apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.oidc.providerURL
  • apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.oidc.clientID
  • apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.oidc.clientSecret

• For GitHub, set apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.strategy to github, then set each of the following to to values provided by GitHub after setting up a GitHub OAuth App:

  • apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.github.clientID
  • apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.github.clientSecret

  Optionally, enumerate GitHub organizations whose members are permitted to authenticate to your Brigade API server under apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.github.allowedOrganizations.

Regardless of which third-party identity provider you select, we recommend using the apiserver.thirdPartyAuth.admins field to enumerate users who should automatically be granted administrative privileges upon initial login. Without this set, the root user would have to be temporarily enabled to facilitate initial setup – and we do not recommend that. Note that removing someone from this list before performing a helm upgrade does not revoke their existing administrative privileges nor does adding a user to this list grant administrative privileges if they have already logged in for the first time. This list strictly manages auto-grant of administrative privileges on first login for each of the enumerated users.

Configure MongoDB

MongoDB is used to persist the API server’s user data, project data, event data, logs, and more. If your use cases require Brigade to be highly available or you have specific data retention requirements, you may wish to tweak various aspects of the MongoDB deployment in the mongodb section of ~/brigade-values.yaml. Extensive discussion of this is out of scope for this guide. Brigade utilizes MongoDB packaged by Bitnami as a sub-chart. Refer directly to their documentation for further details.

We do strongly recommend increasing the size of volumes utilized by MongoDB by setting mongodb.persistence.size to at least 40 gigabytes (40Gi).

Configure ActiveMQ Artemis

Brigade’s event bus is implemented using ActiveMQ Artemis. If your uses cases require Brigade to be highly available, you may wish to set artemis.ha.enabled to true. This will establish a “warm,” secondary node to fail over to in the event that the primary node should fail. Failover and fail back are automatic.

We do not recommend modifying Artemis topology to use distributed queues because it undermines the guarantee that events for a given project are handled on a FIFO basis.

We do strongly recommend increasing the size of volumes utilized by Artemis by setting artemis.persistence.size to at least 40 gigabytes (40Gi).

Configure Shared Storage

Brigade workers and jobs may optionally mount a shared storage volume. This provides a convenient mechanism for jobs to persist results or artifacts to a location that’s accessible to the worker and to downstream jobs.

Brigade is pre-configured to use Kubernetes StorageClass nfs for dynamically shared storage volumes. If you’d like to use an alternative StorageClass, override the value of worker.workspaceStorageClass. The StorageClass used must support access mode ReadWriteMany.

Other Configuration Options

Although we’ve covered the most critical, consider perusing ~/brigade-values.yaml further to discover other settings you may wish to fine tune. The file itself is liberally commented with detailed instructions.

Install Brigade

Finally, it’s time. With ~/brigade-values.yaml updated with configuration suitable for production, we can proceed with installation:

$ helm install brigade \
    oci://ghcr.io/brigadecore/brigade \
    --version v2.6.0 \
    --create-namespace \
    --namespace brigade \
    --values ~/brigade-values.yaml \
    --wait \
    --timeout 300s

⚠️ Installation and initial startup may take a few minutes to complete.

Update DNS

Now that Brigade is deployed, we’ll determine the public IP address of the API server or the ingress controller that will route inbound traffic to the API server. Which of these is applicable depends on the choice you made in the Configure Ingress section.

• If you are not using an ingress controller to route inbound traffic to your API server, use the following command to determine the API server’s public IP:

  $ kubectl get svc brigade-apiserver --namespace brigade \
      --output jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'
  

• If you are using an ingress controller to route inbound traffic to your API server, determine the public IP of that ingress controller. The procedure for this will vary from one ingress controller to the next, but will generally involve querying the ingress controller’s Service of type LoadBalancer. The following example depicts how Brigade’s maintainers make this determination for our own cluster’s Nginx Ingress Controller:

  $ kubectl get svc nginx-ingress-nginx-controller --namespace nginx \
      --output jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'
  

With the public IP in hand, user your domain’s DNS provider to create an A record to map a hostname (the value of apiserver.host) to the public IP.

Verify the Deployment

In this section, we’ll verify our ability to at least log in to our new, production-grade Brigade deployment.

Install the Brigade CLI

If you haven’t done so already, install the Brigade CLI, brig. In general, it can be installed by downloading the appropriate pre-built binary from our releases page to a directory on your machine that is included in your PATH environment variable. Below are instructions for common environments:

Linux

$ curl -Lo /usr/local/bin/brig https://github.com/brigadecore/brigade/releases/download/v2.6.0/brig-linux-amd64
$ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/brig

macOS

The popular Homebrew package manager provides the most convenient method of installing the Brigade CLI on a Mac:

$ brew install brigade-cli

Alternatively, you can install manually by directly downloading a pre-built binary:

$ curl -Lo /usr/local/bin/brig https://github.com/brigadecore/brigade/releases/download/v2.6.0/brig-darwin-amd64
$ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/brig

Windows

> mkdir -force $env:USERPROFILE\bin
> (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("https://github.com/brigadecore/brigade/releases/download/v2.6.0/brig-windows-amd64.exe", "$ENV:USERPROFILE\bin\brig.exe")
> $env:PATH+=";$env:USERPROFILE\bin"

The script above downloads brig.exe and adds it to your PATH for the current session. Add the following line to your PowerShell Profile if you want to make the change permanent:

> $env:PATH+=";$env:USERPROFILE\bin"

Log In

Now you’re ready to log in to Brigade! For the server URL value, use the DNS hostname configured above. In the example below, we use brigade.example.com:

$ brig login --server https://brigade.example.com

This command will return a URL which can be copied, then pasted into your web browser to complete authentication using the configured identity provider. We recommend using the optional --browse (or -b) flag to bypass the manual copy/paste process. Using that flag will immediately navigate to the authentication URL using your system’s default browser.

Upon successful authentication, you will be redirected to a splash page that informs you that you may resume using the Brigade CLI.

Wrap-Up

Now that you have a production-grade Brigade deployment, day-to-day operations can all be completed using the brig CLI.

Upgrading Brigade’s server-side components to a newer release or updating Brigade’s configuration can be accomplished with the helm upgrade command. Uninstalling Brigade can be accomplished with helm uninstall. For more details on using Helm, refer directly to Helm’s own documentation.

Deploying Multiple Brigades

It is possible to deploy multiple Brigade instances to a single Kubernetes cluster. However, there is one piece of configuration necessary for each Brigade instance other than the original. This is due to the global RBAC resources that are created by the original deployment.

For each subsequent Brigade deployment, set rbac.installGlobalResources to false, then deploy as usual.