FIAAS

FIAAS is a system that adds PaaS like functionality on top of Kubernetes.

FIAAS provides abstractions for specifying applications and what is required for them to run in a given infrastructure. These abstractions provide the ability to separate concerns where application developers can provide a specification for their applications and cluster operators can provide specification describing the underlying infrastructure hosting the applications. FIAAS enables integration of applications with the underlying infrastructure and adapts and applies changes to both applications and the infrastructure transparently. This allows for seamless reconfiguration and redeployment of all applications if the underlying infrastructure is changed and enables applications to be deployed and run on infrastructures that are not described or specified in the application. This means that an application can be deployed to two very different Kubernetes clusters, and still work. In this case, FIAAS acts like an “Interface”, defining how the connection should look, and the cluster provides the implementation of that “Interface”.

FIAAS has built-in default application configuration options that will apply to all applications being deployed. This is used for driving applications towards a common convention and standardization that is sensible. These options have built-in defaults but can be adjusted or overwritten as needed on a per application basis.

FIAAS is designed with continous delivery in mind and enables connecting continuous integration systems with kubernetes clusters for deploying updated versions of applications as they become available.

Further information:

Getting Started

Add the FIAAS helm repository

helm repo add fiaas https://fiaas.github.io/helm

Install fiaas-deploy-daemon the default namespace with the default configuration.

helm install fiaas-deploy-daemon fiaas/fiaas-deploy-daemon

In practice you will most likely want to change some of the configuration flags or deploy to a different (or multiple) namespaces. To do this, take a look at the operator guide, and check the values for the helm chart for how to change the configuration.

Now there is a Deploy Daemon running in the default namespace. Deploy Daemon will create a custom resource definition called Application that contains the specification for a given application. Deploy Daemon will watch for new and changed Application resources and provision kubernetes resources as needed.

Since Deploy Daemon has many of the defaults built in application specifications can be quite simple but defaults can be overwritten as needed. A basic application spec can look as simple as this:

version: 3

Specifying only the version implies that only defaults should be used. This example overwrites some of the defaults:

version: 3
healthchecks:
  liveness:
    http:
      path: /_/health
ingress:
- host: hello-world.ingress.local
ports:
- target_port: 5000
replicas:
  maximum: 1
  minimum: 1

The application spec needs to be translated into a kubernetes manifest before it can be applied to the cluster. Generally developers would provide the application spec as an artifact from the output of their build and use some utility for generating a kubernetes manifest from it that can then be applied directly. Mast is a reference implementation for generating application manifests and can be used in a continuous integration setup. It has integration with Artifactory for obtaining application spec artifacts that it is then able to transform into a manifest.

The manifest can then be applied directly to the cluster

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: fiaas.schibsted.io/v1
kind: Application
metadata:
  labels:
    app: hello-world
    fiaas/deployment_id: 8898f334-e6b0-4212-9ac4-c0b2bd8ce74e
  name: hello-world
  namespace: default
spec:
  application: hello-world
  config:
    healthchecks:
      liveness:
        http:
          path: /_/health
    ingress:
    - host: hello-world.ingress.local
    ports:
    - target_port: 5000
    replicas:
      maximum: 1
      minimum: 1
    version: 3
  image: fiaas-test-app:latest
EOF

Now the Deploy Daemon will pick up the application resource and create the required Kubernetes resources such as replicaset, service, ingress etc. as specified by the application specification. The application is now available on hello-world.ingress.local.

The v3 application spec contains more information about the different configuration options that can be expressed through the application specification.

Components

Deploy Daemon is the main component of FIAAS that will continuously look for application descriptions and apply them, effectively deploying applications and provisioning the necessary kubernetes resources that it requires.

Mast can be used for generating the necessary manifest that can be applied to the cluster. The manifest includes an application resource that the Deploy Daemon will deploy. Mast has endpoints that can be consumed by CI systems in combination with Kubernetes api.

Documentation

k8s is a python client library for the Kubernetes api developed by the maintainers of FIAAS.

Contributing

We are happy to accept pull requests that fix bugs or introduce new features!

Before contributing it might be useful to take a look at the governance model to get an understanding of how this project is managed. You should also review the Code of Conduct which all participants in FIAAS projects are expected to adhere to.

If you have found a bug or or want to propose a new feature, please submit a Github issue on the appropriate repository. If you are unsure which repo is appropriate, fiaas-deploy-daemon might be the best choice.

If you want to contribute code, we are also happy to take pull requests, but for non-trivial patches we recommend creating a Github issue first to make it easier to discuss the proposed changes.

Each repository will also have a README and/or CONTRIBUTING file that will also contain useful information for potential contributors.

Get in touch

We have a channel on the Kubernetes slack, come see us in #fiaas.

Presentations

Here are a few presentations featuring FIAAS

fiaas.github.io

Github pages for fiaas

FIAAS

Getting Started

Components

Documentation

Contributing

Get in touch

Presentations

Introduction to FIAAS

Lessons Learned From Maintaining Continuous Delivery While Migrating From a Static Infrastructure to Kubernetes

Evolving a Continuous Delivery Workflow to Kubernetes using Spinnaker

Kubernetes and Spinnaker in Schibsted