Having a development cluster (devel) join the hub

Introduction

Development clusters are responsible for building applications and delivering the applications to a secured registry. The development cluster defines a secure pipeline that includes code and image scans and image signing before delivering them to the registry. OpenShift Pipelines is used for the continuous integration (CI). The Quay registry is deployed on the hub and therefore integration is required for the development pipeline to push images to the registry.

Development clusters also need to be secured and so one part of the deployment is Advanced Cluster Security with a secured configuration. This allows ACS to monitor and report on security issues on the cluster. ACS secured sites report to an ACS Central application that is deployed on the hub.

Allow ACM to deploy the devel applications to a subset of clusters

By default the devel applications are deployed on any development clusters that ACM knows about.

  managedClusterGroups:
  - name: devel
    helmOverrides:
    - name: clusterGroup.isHubCluster
      value: "false"
    clusterSelector:
      matchLabels:
        clusterGroup: devel
      matchExpressions:
      - key: vendor
        operator: In
        values:
          - OpenShift

Remember to commit the changes and push to GitHub so that GitOps can see your changes and apply them.

Deploy a devel cluster

Rather than provide instructions on creating a devel cluster it is assumed that an OpenShift cluster has already been created. Use the openshift-install program provided at cloud.redhat.com

There are a three ways to join the devel cluster to the hub.

Using the ACM user interface
Using the cm tool
Using the clusteradm tool

Devel setup using the ACM UI

After ACM is installed a message regarding a “Web console update is available” may be displayed. Click on the “Refresh web console” link.

update-web-console

On the upper-left side you’ll see a pull down labeled “local-cluster”. Select “All Clusters” from this pull down. This will navigate to the ACM console and to its “Clusters” section

launch-acm-console

Select the “Import cluster” option beside the highlighted Create Cluster button.

import-cluster

On the “Import an existing cluster” page, enter the cluster name and choose Kubeconfig as the “import mode”. Add the tag clusterGroup=devel Press import. Done.

import-with-kubeconfig

Using this method, you are done. Skip to the section Devel is joined but ignore the part about adding the site tag.

Devel setup using `cm` tool

Install the cm (cluster management) command-line tool. See details here
Obtain the KUBECONFIG file from the devel cluster.
On the command-line login into the hub/datacenter cluster (use oc login or export the KUBECONFIG).
Run the following command:

cm attach cluster --cluster <cluster-name> --cluster-kubeconfig <path-to-KUBECONFIG>

Skip to the section Devel is joined

Devel setup using `clusteradm` tool

You can also use clusteradm to join a cluster. The following instructions explain what needs to be done. clusteradm is still in testing.

To deploy a edge cluster you will need to get the datacenter (or hub) cluster’s token. You will need to install clusteradm. On the existing datacenter cluster:
clusteradm get token
When you run the clusteradm command above it replies with the token and also shows you the command to use on the devel. So first you must login to the devel cluster
oc login or
export KUBECONFIG=~/my-ocp-env/devel
Then request to that the devel join the datacenter hub
clusteradm join --hub-token <token from clusteradm get token command > <devel cluster name>
Back on the hub cluster accept the join request
clusteradm accept --clusters <devel-cluster-name>

Skip to the next section, Devel is joined

Devel is joined

Designate the new cluster as a devel site

Now that ACM is no longer deploying the devel applications everywhere, we need to explicitly indicate that the new cluster has the devel role. If you haven’t tagged the cluster as clusterGroup=devel then we can do that here.

We do this by adding the label referenced in the managedSite’s clusterSelector.

Find the new cluster
oc get managedclusters.cluster.open-cluster-management.io
Apply the label
oc label managedclusters.cluster.open-cluster-management.io/YOURCLUSTER clusterGroup=devel

You’re done

That’s it! Go to your devel (edge) OpenShift console and check for the open-cluster-management-agent pod being launched. Be patient, it will take a while for the ACM agent and agent-addons to launch. After that, the operator OpenShift GitOps will run. When it’s finished check that all applications have synced in OpenShift GitOps. Select “Devel Argo CD” from the OpenShift Applications menu.

Then look at the GitOps applications and make sure they have synced completely.

Confirming successful deployment

There are a number of steps you can do to check that the components have deployed:

Pipelines should be available in the console on the left hand side.
Run a pipeline and check the build and if the image gets updated in the Quay registry on the Hub.
You should be able to select the route to the demo application in the test environment.
The development cluster name should show up in the ACS Central console.

Next up

Deploy the the Multicluster DevSecOps secured production cluster