cf-deployment

Table of Contents

• Purpose
• Migrating from cf-release to cf-deployment
• TLS validation
• Deploying CF
• Contributing
• Setup and Prerequisites
• Ops Files
• CI

Purpose

This repo contains a canonical BOSH deployment manifest for deploying the CF Application Runtime without the use of cf-release, relying instead on individual component releases. It replaces the manifest generation scripts in cf-release which have finally been deprecated. It uses several newer features of the BOSH director and CLI. Older directors may need to be upgraded and have their configurations extended in order to support cf-deployment.

cf-deployment embodies several opinions about the CF Application Runtime. It:

• prioritizes readability and meaning to a human operator. For instance, only necessary configuration is included.
• emphasizes security and production-readiness by default.
  • CredHub is used by default to generate strong passwords, certs, and keys. There are no default credentials, even in bosh-lite.
  • TLS/SSL features are enabled on every job which supports TLS.
• uses three AZs, of which two are used to provide redundancy for most instance groups. The third is used only for instance groups that should not have even instance counts, such as consul.
• uses Diego (source code) natively, does not support the deprecated DEAs, and enables diego-specific features such as ssh access to apps by default.
• deploys jobs to handle platform data persistence using singleton versions of the cf-mysql release for databases and the CAPI release’s singleton WebDAV job for blob storage. See the database and blobstore sections of the deployment guide for more resilient options.
• assumes load-balancing will be handled by the IaaS or an external deployment.

Can I Transition from cf-release?

The Release Integration team supports a transition path from cf-release. You can find tooling and documentation for performing the migration in our cf-deployment-transition repo.

TLS validation

Many test, development, and “getting started” environments do not have valid TLS certificates installed in their load balancers. cf-deployment skips TLS validation on some components that access each other via the “front door” of the Cloud Foundry load balancer for ease of use in such environments. This is a temporary solution that will be addressed soon by the BOSH Trusted Certificates workflow.

Production deployers who have valid or otherwise trusted load balancer certificates should use the stop-skipping-tls-validation.yml opsfile to force the validation of TLS certificates for all components.

Deploying CF

Deployment instructions have become verbose, so we’ve moved them into a dedicated deployment guide here.

There’s a small section in that doc that tries to help operators reason about choices they can make in their deployments. Take a look at Notes for operators.

See the rest of this document for more on the new CLI, deployment vars, and configuring your BOSH director.

Contributing

Although the default branch for the repository is master, we ask that all pull requests be made against the develop branch. Please also take a look at the “style guide”, which lays out some guidelines for adding properties or jobs to the deployment manifest.

Before submitting a pull request or pushing to develop, please run ./scripts/test which interpolates all of our ops files with the bosh cli.

By default, the test suite omits semantic tests, which require both jq and yq installed. If you wish to run them, please install these requirements and set RUN_SEMANTIC=true in your environment.

Note: it is necessary to run the tests from the root of the repo.

If you add an Ops-file, you will need to document it in its corresponding README and add it to the ops file tests in scripts/test.

We ask that pull requests and other changes be successfully deployed, and tested with the latest sha of CATs.

Setup and Prerequisites

cf-deployment relies on newer BOSH features, and requires a bosh director with a valid cloud-config that has been configured with a certificate authority. It also requires the new bosh CLI, which it relies on to generate and fill-in needed variables.

BOSH director and stemcells

cf-deployment requires BOSH v262+ and 3468+ Linux stemcells.

BOSH CLI

cf-deployment requires the new BOSH CLI.

BOSH cloud-config

cf-deployment assumes that you’ve uploaded a compatible cloud-config to the BOSH director. The cloud-config produced by bbl is compatible by default, which covers GCP, AWS, and Azure. The iaas-support directory includes tools and templates for building cloud-configs for other IaaSes, including bosh-lite, vSphere, Openstack, and Alibaba Cloud. For other IaaSes, you may need to do some engineering work to figure out the right cloud config (and possibly ops files) to get it working for cf-deployment.

BOSH runtime-config

cf-deployment requires that you have uploaded a runtime-config for BOSH DNS. We recommended that you use the one provided by the bosh-deployment repo:

bosh update-runtime-config bosh-deployment/runtime-configs/dns.yml --name dns

Deployment variables and CredHub

cf-deployment.yml requires additional information to provide environment-specific or sensitive configuration such as the system domain and various credentials. To do this in the default configuration, we use CredHub, which is deployed on your BOSH director by default if you are using bbl. Where necessary credential values are not present, CredHub will generate new values based on the type information stored in cf-deployment.yml.

Note: BOSH vars-store is no longer the default way to store and generate credentials and will be deprecated in cf-deployment 3.0.

Necessary variables that BOSH can’t ask CredHub to generate need to be supplied as well. In the default case this is just the system domain, but some ops files introduce additional variables. See the summary for the particular ops files you’re using for any additional necessary variables.

There are three ways to supply such additional variables.

1. They can be provided by passing individual -v arguments. The syntax for -v arguments is -v <variable-name>=<variable-value>. This is the recommended method for supplying the system domain.
2. They can be provided in a yaml file accessed from the command line with the -l or --vars-file flag. This is the recommended method for configuring external persistence services.
3. They can be stored in CredHub directly with the CredHub CLI. If you do this, then you need follow variable namespacing rules respected by BOSH described here.

Migrating from Vars Store to CredHub

Before using CredHub for cf-deployment, you will need to migrate your credentials from vars-store to CredHub. We have a utility to help you migrate.

Ops Files

The configuration of CF represented by cf-deployment.yml is intended to be a workable, secure, fully-featured default. When the need arises to make different configuration choices, we accomplish this with the -o/--ops-file flags. These flags read a single .yml file that details operations to be performed on the manifest before variables are generated and filled. We’ve supplied some common manifest modifications in the operations directory. More details can be found in the Ops-file README.

A note on community, experimental, and test ops-files

The operations directory includes subdirectories for “community”, “experimental”, and “test” ops-files.

Addons

These ops-files make changes to most or all instance groups. They can be applied to the BOSH Director’s runtime config, or directly to an individual deployment manifest.

The ops-file to configure platform component logging with rsyslog is such an add-on. Please see the Addon Ops-file README for details.

Community

“Community” ops-files are contributed by the Cloud Foundry community. They are not maintained or supported by the Release Integration team. For details, see the Community Ops-file README

Experimental

“Experimental” ops-files represent configurations that we expect to promote to blessed configuration eventually, meaning that, once the configurations have been sufficiently validated, they will become part of cf-deployment.yml and the ops-files will be removed. For details, see the Experimental Ops-file README.

Test

“Test” ops-files are configurations that we run in our testing pipeline to enable certain features. We include them in the public repository (rather than in our private CI repositories) for a few reasons, depending on the particular ops-file.

Some files are included because we suspect that the configurations will be commonly needed but not easily generalized. For example, add-persistent-isolation-segment.yml shows how a deployer can add an isolated Diego cell, but the ops-file is hard to apply repeatably. In this case, the ops-file is an example.

CI

The ci for cf-deployment automatically bumps to the latest versions of its component releases on the develop branch. These bumps, along with any other changes made to develop, are deployed to a single long-running environment and tested with CATs before being merged to master if CATs goes green.

Each version of cf-deployment is given a corresponding branch in the CATs repo, so that users can discover which version of CATs to run against their deployments. For example, if you’ve deployed cf-deployment v0.35.0, check out the cf0.35 branch in cf-acceptance-tests to run CATs.

The configuration for our pipeline can be found here.