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GETTING_STARTED.md

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Getting started

This repository contains all scripts required for deploying a FIWARE platform to run on an OpenShift cluster.

Preconditions

Since this repository concentrates on deploying the platform, we require the underlying infrastructure to be already setup in a defined way. The listed preconditions have to be met and are constantly tested, but it might also work on comparable alternative setups.

The following preconditions need to be fulfilled before starting ⚠️ :

NOTE: A user with cluster-admin permissions is needed to install the ArgoCD operator.

OpenShift user permissions

NOTE: A certain understanding of how OpenShift RBAC works is required to understand this topic.

In order to be able to deploy FIWARE applications, an Openshift user needs:

  1. To have permissions to manage ArgoCD applications, given by the role applications.argoproj.io-v1alpha1-admin. Usually this role is given only inside the namespace where ArgoCD runs.
  2. To have permissions to create projects (if the projects are not already pre-created for him/her), given by the role self-provisioner.

So, we are gonna assume the user alice requires both permissions:

oc -n <ARGOCD_NAMESPACE> adm policy add-role-to-user applications.argoproj.io-v1alpha1-admin alice
oc adm policy add-cluster-role-to-user self-provisioner alice

ArgoCD permissions

NOTE: A certain understanding of how OpenShift RBAC works is required to understand this topic.

When using ArgoCD to deploy applications in the cluster, the ArgoCD service account XXX-argocd-server is basically deploying things on our behalf, meaning is this SA to whom we need to provide the right permissions to deploy our applications.

NOTE: The ArgoCD SA name follows the pattern <ARGOCD_INSTANCE_NAME>-argocd-server, so if for example your ArgoCD instances is named "myargo", then the SA name would be myargo-argocd-server

When our applications are composed by only traditional OpenShift/K8s objects such as deployments, services or secrets, giving ArgoCD SA the admin role would be enough. But when our applications are composed by no so traditional objects such as Operators CRs like Prometheus ServiceMonitors or PrometheuRules (like some of the FIWARE apps do) then we need additional permissions.

We could be very granular and test ArgoCD with every app we deploy and see if the permissions are enough, otherwise look for the right role to be assigned, but this requires a trial and error approach, very time consuming.

In our case, as the number of applications deployed is substantial, and some of those are complex with many objects, we have decided to give the ArgoCD SA the cluster-admin role, but at a namespace level. This may sound counterintuitive and feel like we are giving the ArgoCD SA root like access to the whole cluster, but that is not the case.

We are giving the ArgoCD SA root like access, but only at a certain namespaces, this way we don't need to study every application helm chart in advance, but at the same time, we are scoping the permissions to a certain namespace.

With the following command, we give the ArgoCD running in the namespace <ARGOCD_NAMESPACE> cluster-admin permissions in the namespace <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE>, meaning ArgoCD can deploy any object inside that namespace, but only in that namespace.

NOTE: Remember to create your namespace <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE> before executing this command. See step below.

# get ArgoCD SA name
oc -n <ARGOCD_NAMESPACE> get sa | grep argocd-server

# Give the SA the right permissions
oc -n <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE> adm policy add-role-to-user cluster-admin system:serviceaccount:<ARGOCD_NAMESPACE>:<SA_NAME>

Installation steps

1. Fork the repo

To build and configure the platform using the GitOps-Pattern, you should fork this repository to your own git. On github, follow the fork-a-repo tutorial. For other git-installations, see the corresponding documentation. Now you can git-clone your own fork.

2. Decide which FIWARE applications to deploy

Go to fiware-platform/values.yaml and set the enabled value to either true or false. To know more about what are the FIWARE components of this platform you can go to the FIWARE components and configuration docs.

For example, you can enable Orion-LD but disable Quantum Leap:

applications:
  - name: orion-ld
    enabled: true
    source_path: applications/orion-ld/chart
    source_ref: *branch
    destination: *destination
    helm_values:
    - values.yaml
    values:
      orion-ld:
        myvalue: XXX

  - name: quantumleap
    enabled: false
    source_path: applications/quantumleap/chart
    source_ref: *branch
    destination: *destination
    helm_values:
    - values.yaml

NOTE:
By default each application is deployed with a sane set of default values that have been tested to work in most cases. But this does not mean they are the right fit for a production ready deployment. Please verify each application potential values (as all of them are Helm charts). You can either directly change the values.yaml of individual apps, or use the values: property directly in the app definition list in fiware-platform/values.yaml to override and/or set default values. Also, some applications have values-secured.yaml and values-unsecured.yaml files to secret management. If you are not using secrets (next step), you can change the passwords in the values-unsecured.yaml file and the apps will use that file merged with the values.yaml file.

3. Decide if you want to use Sealed Secrets

By default, all passwords needed for the deployment are in plain text in the Values files of each component. If you want to keep those secrets safe, follow this documentation and then continue from this point onward.

4. Set the repo url in the values.yaml

Since ArgoCD should now follow the new fork, instead of the original repository, you have to replace the source in fiware-platform/values.yaml.

This can be done with this one liner:

sed -i'' -e 's,source: https://github.com/FIWARE-Ops/marinera,source:  <FORK_URL>,g' fiware-platform/values.yaml

5. Create the target namespace inside your cluster

WARNING: Make sure for the next steps that you are logged in to the cluster via oc login and that the account has enough permissions to create namespaces and create resources

The platform should be deployed to a namespace. Create the namespace via:

oc new-project <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE>

WARNING: Depending on your ArgoCD deployment and configuration you may need to add the label argocd.argoproj.io/managed-by:<ARGOCD_NAMESPACE> to your <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE>

oc label namespace <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE> argocd.argoproj.io/managed-by=<ARGOCD_NAMESPACE>

6. Set the target namespace in the values.yaml

Similar to the source, the destination namespace can be replaced. This can be done with the following command:

sed -i'' -e 's/destination_namespace: \&destination demo/destination_namespace: \&destination <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE>/g' fiware-platform/values.yaml

7. Set the target branch in the values.yaml

Similar to the source, the branch can be replaced is needed. By default when forking you are still using main branch, if you want to deploy from another one, you could change it so the ArgoCD apps will sync to that branch. This can be done with the following command:

sed -i'' -e 's/branch: \&branch main/branch: \&branch <FORK_BRANCH>/g' fiware-platform/values.yaml

8. Set the target namespace as the name of the release in the values.yaml

Since all of your ArgoCD applications are going to live in the ArgoCD namespace, it is important to differentiate them with the name of the release, so a good strategy is to make it the name of the namespace you are deploying to:

sed -i'' -e 's/release: demo/release: <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE>/g' fiware-platform/values.yaml

9. Apply the applications to the cluster

Now that everything is prepared, we can deploy the FIWARE components chosen by creating the ArgoCD applications and applying them to the cluster:

cd fiware-platform/
helm template . | oc -n <ARGOCD_NAMESPACE> apply -f -

NOTE: The deployment of the entire platform will take between 4 and 6 minutes with several components restarting several times until their dependencies are fulfilled.

This will create ArgoCD apps.

FIWARE components deployed

10. Uninstall the platform

If you want to uninstall the FIWARE platform, you just need to run the following commands:

CRITICAL: Make sure you are in the correct namespace in the cluster and the name of the release inside fiware-platform/values.yaml is the one you are going to uninstall.

cd fiware-platform/
helm template . | oc -n <ARGOCD_NAMESPACE> delete -f -

oc delete project <PLATFORM_NAMESPACE>