CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Big Bang

Thanks for taking the time to contribute to BigBang!

Developers Guide

Big Bang is designed in such a way as to be as easily deployed locally as it is in production. In fact, most contributions begin locally.

Follow the steps below to get a complete local instantiation of Big Bang up locally using k3d.

Local Development Quickstart

Local k3d cluster

# Create a local k3d cluster with the appropriate port forwards
k3d cluster create --k3s-server-arg "--disable=traefik" --k3s-server-arg "--disable=metrics-server" -p 80:80@loadbalancer -p 443:443@loadbalancer

Deploying Big Bang

The Big Bang environment template should be copied locally to start your deployment. Follow the instructions in the template's readme and in the Big Bang docs for configuration.

# Deploy official, hardened fluxv2 from Iron Bank
# Alternatives:
# - Install non-hardened image: `flux install`
# - Install unofficial images from Big Bang repo: `flux install --registry registry.dsop.io/platform-one/big-bang/apps/sandbox/fluxv2`
hack/flux-install.sh

# Apply the development sops secret
# Modify sops-create.sh if you use your own SOPS secret
hack/sops-create.sh

# The above command creates the 'bigbang' namespace. If you skip it, create your own
kubectl create namespace bigbang

# Apply the necessary dev secrets (e.g. pull secrets, certs)
# The .yaml files used for this are from the Big Bang environment template
sops -d bigbang/base/secrets.enc.yaml | kubectl apply -n bigbang -f -
sops -d bigbang/dev/secrets.enc.yaml | kubectl apply -n bigbang -f -

# Apply a local version of the umbrella chart
# NOTE: This is the alternative to deploying a HelmRelease and having flux manage it, we use a local copy to avoid having to commit every change
# NOTE: Use yq to parse the kustomize values patch and pipe it to the helm values
# The .yaml files used for yq are from the Big Bang environment template
# NOTE: Flux will take care of the reconcilitation and retry loops for us, it is normal to see resources fail to deploy a few times on boot
yq m bigbang/prod/configmap.yaml bigbang/base/configmap.yaml | helm helm upgrade -i bigbang chart -n bigbang --create-namespace -f -

# After making changes to the umbrella chart or values, you can update the chart idempotently
yq m bigbang/prod/configmap.yaml bigbang/base/configmap.yaml | helm helm upgrade -i bigbang chart -n bigbang --create-namespace -f -

# A convenience development script is provided to force fluxv2 to reconcile all helmreleases within the cluster
hack/sync.sh

DNS

To ease with local development, the TLD bigbang.dev has been purchased with the following CNAME record:

CNAME: *.bigbang.dev -> 127.0.0.1

All routable endpoints BigBang deploys will use the TLD of bigbang.dev by default. It is expected that consumers modify this appropriately for their environment.

Secrets & Certificates

A development only gpg key is provided at hack/bigbang-dev.asc that is used to encrypt and decrypt the "secret" information in hack/secrets.

We cannot stress enough, do not use this key to encrypt real secret data. It is a shared key meant to demonstrate the workflow of secrets management within Big Bang.

# Import the gpg key
gpg --import bigbang-dev.asc

# Decrypt the Big Bang Development Wildcard Cert
sops -d hack/secrets/ingress-cert.yaml

# Encrypt the Big Bang Development Wildcard Cert
sops -e hack/ingress-cert.yaml

Merge requests process

The following is meant to serve as an overview of the pipeline stages required to get a commit merged.

Pipeline Stages

The pipeline is split into several stages:

Linting

Several linting rules are first run to ensure yaml standards are met within the primary ./charts folder.

This stage is ran on every commit, and is a requirement for merging.

Smoke Testing

For fast feedback testing, an ephemeral in cluster pipeline is created using k3d that lives for the lifetime of the gitlab ci job. Within that cluster, BigBang is deployed, and an initial set of smoke tests are performed against the deployment to ensure basic conformance.

This stage verifies several easy to check assumptions such as:

• does BigBang successfully install
• does BigBang successfully upgrade (from master)
• are endpoints routable

This stage also serves as a guide for local development, and care is taken to ensure all pipeline actions within this stage are repeatable locally.

This stage is ran on every commit, and is a requirement for merging.

Infrastructure Testing

Ultimately, BigBang is designed to deploy production ready workloads on real infrastructure. While local and ephemeral clusters are excellent for fast feedback during development, changes must ultimately be tested on real clusters on real infrastructure.

As part of BigBang's charter, it is expected work on any CNCF conformant kubernetes cluster, on multiple clouds, and on premise environments. By very definition, this means infrastructure testing is slow. To strive for a pipeline with a happy medium of providing fast feedback while still exhaustively testing against environments that closely mirror production, infrastructure testing only occurs on manual actions on merge request commits.

When you are comfortable your branch is ready to be merged, opening up an merge request will trigger the creation of a suite of infrastructure testing jobs which will require a manual action from a project maintainer (assuming previous linting and smoke tests have passed). Once the commit(s) are validated against the infrastructure tests, your changes are ready to be merged!

For most of the infrastructure testing, terraform is chosen as the IAC tool of choice for infrastructure that BigBang owns, while the cluster creation process follows the vendors recommended installation process.

The infrastructure pipeline is designed to have no human interaction, and are scoped to the lifecycle of the pipeline. This means a single pipeline is fully responsible for provisioning infrastructure, but just as important, deprovisioning infrastructure, ensuring resources are not orphaned.

More information on the full set of infrastructure tests are below:

Network Creation

For each cloud, a BigBang owned network will be created that conform with the appropriate set of tests about to be ran. For example, to validate that Big Bang deploys in a connected environment on AWS, a VPC, subnets, route tables, etc... are created, and the outputs are made available through terraform's remote data source.

Cluster(s) Creation

Several types of clusters are created within the previously provisioned network(s), and follow the vendors recommended iac approach.

For example, an rke2 cluster is created that leverages the upstream terraform modules, and an eks cluster is created with the upstream terraform modules.

It is a hard requriement at this stage that every cluster outputs an admin scoped kubeconfig as a gitlab ci artifact. This artifact will be leveraged in the following stages for interacting with the created cluster.

Big Bang Installation

Given the kubeconfig created in the previous stage, BigBang is installed on the cluster using the same installation process used in the smoke tests.

Like any BigBang installation, several cluster requirements (TODO: doc these) must be met before BigBang is installed, and it is up to the vendor to ensure those requirements are met.

Big Bang Tests

Assuming BigBang has installed successfully, additional tests residing within the ./tests folder of this repository are run against the deployed cluster. These tests range from automated UI testing, to internal kubernetes resource validation and verification.

TODO: Document these tests more once they are flushed out.

Teardown

Infrastructure teardown happens in the reverse sequence as to which they are deployed, and the pipeline will ensure these teardown jobs are always ran, regardless of whether or not the previous jobs were successful.

Combined with terraform's declarative remote state, the "always on" teardown ensures no orphaned resources are left over once tests are run.

Within the teardown process, the commit scoped terraform workspace is also deleted to ensure the remote state remains clean.

For example, if an EKS cluster fails to provision, a full teardown of BigBang, EKS, and the network will be run, even though BigBang was never deployed. This will result in 2 failing jobs (EKS up and BigBang down), but will ensure that no infrastructure resources become orphaned.