Central Deployer Pattern

Kubes can be use as either an app-centric or ops-centric tool.

app-centric: Each app repo has it’s own .kubes settings files. This is useful if your applications are very differently setup.
ops-centric: Each app repo has pretty much the same .kubes settings files. This is useful if your applications are very similarly set up.

Setup

With an ops-centric approach, you use the same .kubes settings files for the app repos you want to use. For example:

https://github.com/org/app1
https://github.com/org/app2

You then also have a

https://github.com/org/.kubes

You can simply copy the .kubes folder into the app repo folder or even add the repo/.kubes as a submodule.

You’ll end up with something like this:

app1/.kubes
app2/.kubes

Then to deploy different app level settings.

App-Level Specific Settings

You can override all the different settings at the app-level when KUBES_APP is set.

For app1:

cd app1
KUBES_APP=app1 kubes deploy

And for app2:

cd app2
KUBES_APP=app2 kubes deploy

Config Env

Override config/app.rb with app-level settings like so:

.kubes/config/env/app1/base.rb
.kubes/config/env/app1/dev.rb
.kubes/config/env/app1/prod.rb
.kubes/config/env/app2/base.rb
.kubes/config/env/app2/dev.rb
.kubes/config/env/app2/prod.rb

Variables

Override .kubes/variables/base.rb, .kubes/variables/dev.rb etc like so:

.kubes/variables/app1/base.rb
.kubes/variables/app1/dev.rb
.kubes/variables/app1/prod.rb
.kubes/variables/app2/base.rb
.kubes/variables/app2/dev.rb
.kubes/variables/app2/prod.rb

Resources

Override resources like so:

.kubes/resources/shared/config_map/app1.yaml
.kubes/resources/shared/config_map/app2.yaml
.kubes/resources/shared/secret/app1.yaml
.kubes/resources/shared/secret/app2.yaml

Also check out: App Overrides Docs.

The central deployer approach is removes duplication of the kubes config files between projects. Leveraging app-level overrides gives provides a great degree of control.

If the settings start to diverge too much, then it probably makes sense to use separate .kubes files in that app specific repo.

Getting Started