Kubernetes pipeline in Action

1. Automatic deployment pipeline based on Kubernetes and Docker in practice

Rakuten has been creating a service to monitor endpoints and display them on a convenient dashboard. Even though the project uses Docker technology for deployment, there are many manual steps involved with deployment and maintenance.

Although relying on Docker containers, many of the steps rely on the OPS team, and can take up to a day to start the deployment process. This causes a long lead time for changes in source code to be reflected in production, and rolling back on errors a pain.

To alleviate this, the EPM team adopted the ZED automated platform. This platform will allow the use of Jenkins pipelines to automate every step from commit to deployment. In this case, when a code change is detected in the master branch of the git repository, Jenkins will start a new build of the pipeline.

The pipeline will execute jobs that will generate a new Dockerfile and Kubernetes manifest files, and finally deploy the updated application to a Kubernetes cluster. All of these steps will happen without developer interaction.

This has drastically reduced the amount of time and effort spent in maintaining the EPM Dashboard. However, adopting a new platform was not without its own challenges. The service needed some refactoring to further split into microservices between the front and backend, which cause some database connection issues between containers. There were also issues with the right allocation of memory resources, which would cause the container to crash and restart constantly.

Once solved, the ZED pipeline has seen serious increases in productivity of the team and maintainability of the system. Developers have more control over the infrastructure and can make changes quickly and efficiently. The migration has also provided our team with more practical experience on splitting applications into microservices, all will allow us to migrate more advanced applications in the future.

Profile
Cameron Long (Rakuten)

Internship student from Canada in Automation Architecture, with backgrounds in the Manufacturing and Oil and Gas industries.

Now working with Rakuten, one of the biggest names in Japan. Known for it’s vast Ecosystem of services from internet shopping to travel, Rakuten has grown to be one of the biggest global innovation companies. (At this event Cameron will talk about building consistent company ecosystem using DevOps technologies)

2. TBD

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