If you have ever deployed an application to Kubernetes, even a simple one, you are probably familiar with deployments. A deployment describes the pods to run, how many of them to run and how they should be upgraded. That last point is especially important because the strategy you select has an impact on the availability of the deployment. A deployment supports the following two strategies:
- Recreate: all existing pods are killed and new ones are created; this obviously leads to some downtime
- RollingUpdate: pods are gradually replaced which means there is a period when old and new pods coexist; this can result in issues for stateful pods or if there is no backward compatibility
But what if you want to use other methods such as BlueGreen or Canary? Although you could do that with a custom approach that uses deployments, there are some solution that provide a more automated approach. Below, I discuss two of them briefly. Videos provide a more in depth look.
Argo Rollouts
One of the solutions out there is Argo Rollouts. It is very easy to use. If you want to start slowly, with BlueGreen deployments and manual approval for instance, Argo Rollouts is recommended. It has a nice kubectl plugin and integration with Argo CD, a GitOps solution.
The following video demonstrates BlueGreen deployments:
This video discusses a canary deployment with Argo Rollouts albeit a simple one without metric analysis:
This video shows the integration between Argo Rollouts and Argo CD:
One thing to note is that, instead of a deployment, you will create a rollout object. It is easy to convert an existing deployment into a rollout. Other tools such as Flagger (see below), provide their functionality on top of an existing deployment.
For traffic splitting and metrics analysis, Argo Rollouts does not support Linkerd. More information about traffic splitting and management can be found here.
Flagger
Flagger, by Weaveworks, is another solution that provides BlueGreen and Canary deployment support to Kubernetes. In the video below, I demonstrate the basic look and feel of doing a canary deployment that includes metric analysis. Linkerd is used for gradual traffic shifting to the canary based on the built-in success rate metric of Linkerd:
If you want to get started with canary releases and easy traffic splitting and metrics, I suggest using the Flagger and Linkerd combination. This is based simply on the fact that Linkerd is much easier to install and use than Istio. Argo Rollouts in combination with Istio and Prometheus could be used to achieve exactly the same result.
Which one to use?
If you just want BlueGreen deployments with manual approvals, I would suggest using Argo Rollouts. When you integrate it with Argo CD, you can even use the Argo CD UI to promote your deployment. If you are comfortable with Istio and Prometheus, you can go a step further and add metrics analysis to automatically progress your deployment. You can also use a simple Kubernetes job to validate your deployment. Also, note that other metrics providers are supported.
Flagger supports more options for traffic splitting and metrics, due to its support for both Linkerd and Istio. Because Linkerd is so easy to use, Flagger is simpler to get started with canary releases and metrics analysis.
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