Deploying the online boutique sample application

Introduction

Note

On the development cluster you used Tilt to deploy the sample application. On the staging environment, kustomize will be used to initially deploy the application and then ArgoCD will do the heavy lifting for future deployments.

In this section you will learn how to deploy the online boutique sample application using Kustomize. It is tool for customizing Kubernetes configurations. It has the following features to manage application configuration files:

generating resources from other sources
setting cross-cutting fields for resources
composing and customizing collections of resources

A more common use case of Kustomize is that you’ll need multiple variants of a common set of resources, e.g., a development, staging and production variant. For this purpose, kustomize supports the idea of an overlay and a base. Both are represented by a kustomization file. The base declares things that the variants share in common (both resources and a common customization of those resources), and the overlays declare the differences. This is well represented in the structure of the online boutique sample application repository structure.

Info

You will be using the kubectl built-in version of Kustomize.

Prerequisites

To complete this section you will need:

A container registry already set up as explained in the Set up DOCR section.
The microservices-demo images build and pushed to DOCR as explained in the Set up DOCR --> Building and pushing docker images to DOCR
A Kubernetes cluster (DOKS) up and running as explained in the Set up DOKS section.
Doctl utility already installed as explained in the Installing Required Tools -> Doctl section.

Bootstrap the online boutique application using Kustomize

Clone your fork of the kubernetes-sample-apps if you haven't already (make sure to replace the <> placeholders).
```
git clone https://github.com/<YOUR_GITHUB_ACCOUNT_USERNAME>/kubernetes-sample-apps.git
```
Info

The kubernetes-sample-apps repository was forked initially in the Setup DOCR section.
Change directory to the microservices-demo folder:
```
cd kubernetes-sample-apps/microservices-demo
```
Deploy the Kustomization to your cluster using kubectl:
```
kubectl apply -k kustomize/staging
```
Note

To verify that the deployment was succesful run the kubectl get all -n microservices-demo-staging command. The application is deployed to the staging environment using the images built and pushed in the Setup DOCR section.

Access the web interface by port-forwarding the frontend service:

kubectl port-forward service/frontend -n microservices-demo-staging 9090:80

Open a web browser and point to localhost:9090. You should see the online boutique welcome page.

Note
Although you open a connection to localhost in your web browser, traffic is forwarded to the remote staging cluster by kubectl.

Next, you will deploy and configure the Nginx ingress controller for your staging cluster (DOKS) to expose microservices to the outside world. You will also set up cert-manager to automatically issue valid TLS certificates for your applications.