Deploy to Kubernetes cluster

Deploy manifests action for Kubernetes

This action is used to deploy manifests to Kubernetes clusters. It requires that the cluster context be set earlier in the workflow by using either the Azure/aks-set-context action or the Azure/k8s-set-context action. It also requires Kubectl to be installed (you can use the Azure/setup-kubectl action).

If you are looking to automate your workflows to deploy to Azure Web Apps and Azure Web App for Containers, consider using Azure/webapps-deploy action.

Action capabilities

Following are the key capabilities of this action:

Artifact substitution: Takes a list of container images which can be specified along with their tags or digests. They are substituted into the non-templatized version of manifest files before applying to the cluster to ensure that the right version of the image is pulled by the cluster nodes.
Object stability checks: Rollout status is checked for the Kubernetes objects deployed. This is done to incorporate stability checks while computing the action status as success/failure.
Secret handling: The secret names specified as inputs in the action are used to augment the input manifest files with imagePullSecrets values before deploying to the cluster. Also, checkout the Azure/k8s-create-secret action for creation of generic or docker-registry secrets in the cluster.
Deployment strategy Supports both canary and blue-green deployment strategies
- Canary strategy: Workloads suffixed with '-baseline' and '-canary' are created. There are two methods of traffic splitting supported:
  - Service Mesh Interface: Service Mesh Interface abstraction allows for plug-and-play configuration with service mesh providers such as Linkerd and Istio. Meanwhile, this action takes away the hard work of mapping SMI's TrafficSplit objects to the stable, baseline and canary services during the lifecycle of the deployment strategy. Service mesh based canary deployments using this action are more accurate as service mesh providers enable granular percentage traffic split (via service registry and sidecar containers injected into pods alongside application containers).
  - Only Kubernetes (no service mesh): In the absence of service mesh, while it may not be possible to achieve exact percentage split at the request level, it is still possible to perform canary deployments by deploying -baseline and -canary workload variants next to the stable variant. The service routes requests to pods of all three workload variants as the selector-label constraints are met (KubernetesManifest will honor these when creating -baseline and -canary variants). This achieves the intended effect of routing only a portion of total requests to the canary.
- Blue-Green strategy: Choosing blue-green strategy with this action leads to creation of workloads suffixed with '-green'. An identified service is one that is supplied as part of the input manifest(s) and targets a workload in the supplied manifest(s). There are three route-methods supported in the action:
  - Service route-method: Identified services are configured to target the green deployments.
  - Ingress route-method: Along with deployments, new services are created with '-green' suffix (for identified services), and the ingresses are in turn updated to target the new services.
  - SMI route-method: A new TrafficSplit object is created for each identified service. The TrafficSplit object is updated to target the new deployments. This works only if SMI is set up in the cluster.
  Traffic is routed to the new workloads only after the time provided as version-switch-buffer input has passed. The promote action creates workloads and services with new configurations but without any suffix. reject routes traffic back to the old workloads and deletes the '-green' workloads.

Action inputs

Action inputs	Description
action (Required)	Acceptable values: deploy/promote/reject. Promote or reject actions are used to promote or reject canary/blue-green deployments. Sample YAML snippets are provided below for guidance.
manifests (Required)	Path to the manifest files to be used for deployment
namespace (Optional)	Namespace within the cluster to deploy to.
images (Optional)	Fully qualified resource URL of the image(s) to be used for substitutions on the manifest files. This multiline input accepts specifying multiple artifact substitutions in newline separated form. For example: `images: \| contosodemo.azurecr.io/foo:test1 contosodemo.azurecr.io/bar:test2` In this example, all references to contosodemo.azurecr.io/foo and contosodemo.azurecr.io/bar are searched for in the image field of the input manifest files. For the matches found, the tags test1 and test2 are substituted.
imagepullsecrets (Optional)	Multiline input where each line contains the name of a docker-registry secret that has already been setup within the cluster. Each of these secret names are added under imagePullSecrets field for the workloads found in the input manifest files
pull-images (Optional)	Acceptable values: true/false Default value: true Switch whether to pull the images from the registry before deployment to find out Dockerfile's path in order to add it to the annotations
strategy (Optional)	Acceptable values: none/canary/blue-green. Deployment strategy to be used while applying manifest files on the cluster. none - No deployment strategy is used when deploying. canary - Canary deployment strategy is used when deploying to the cluster. blue-green - Blue-Green deployment strategy is used when deploying to cluster.
traffic-split-method (Optional)	Acceptable values: pod/smi. Default value: pod SMI: Percentage traffic split is done at request level using service mesh. Service mesh has to be setup by cluster admin. Orchestration of TrafficSplit objects of SMI is handled by this action. Pod: Percentage split not possible at request level in the absence of service mesh. Percentage input is used to calculate the replicas for baseline and canary as a percentage of replicas specified in the input manifests for the stable variant.
percentage (Optional but required if strategy is canary)	Used to compute the number of replicas of '-baseline' and '-canary' variants of the workloads found in manifest files. For the specified percentage input, if (percentage * numberOfDesirerdReplicas)/100 is not a round number, the floor of this number is used while creating '-baseline' and '-canary'. For example, if Deployment hello-world was found in the input manifest file with 'replicas: 4' and if 'strategy: canary' and 'percentage: 25' are given as inputs to the action, then the Deployments hello-world-baseline and hello-world-canary are created with 1 replica each. The '-baseline' variant is created with the same image and tag as the stable version (4 replica variant prior to deployment) while the '-canary' variant is created with the image and tag corresponding to the new changes being deployed
baseline-and-canary-replicas (Optional and relevant only if traffic-split-method is canary)	The number of baseline and canary replicas. Percentage traffic split is controlled in the service mesh plane, the actual number of replicas for canary and baseline variants could be controlled independently of the traffic split. For example, assume that the input Deployment manifest desired 30 replicas to be used for stable and that the following inputs were specified for the action `strategy: canary trafficSplitMethod: smi percentage: 20 baselineAndCanaryReplicas: 1` In this case, stable variant will receive 80% traffic while baseline and canary variants will receive 10% each (20% split equally between baseline and canary). However, instead of creating baseline and canary with 3 replicas, the explicit count of baseline and canary replicas is honored. That is, only 1 replica each is created for baseline and canary variants.
route-method (Optional and relevant only if strategy is blue-green)	Acceptable values: service/ingress/smi. Default value: service. Traffic is routed based on this input. Service: Service selector labels are updated to target '-green' workloads. Ingress: Ingress backends are updated to target the new '-green' services which in turn target '-green' deployments. SMI: A TrafficSplit object is created for each required service to route traffic to new workloads.
version-switch-buffer (Optional and relevant only if strategy is blue-green)	Acceptable values: 1-300. Default value: 0. Waits for the given input in minutes before routing traffic to '-green' workloads.
force (Optional)	Deploy when a previous deployment already exists. If true then '--force' argument is added to the apply command. Using '--force' argument is not recommended in production.
annotate-namespace (Optional)	Acceptable values: true/false Default value: true Switch whether to annotate the namespace resources object or not

Usage Examples

Basic deployment (without any deployment strategy)

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }}"
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    kubectl-version: "latest"

Canary deployment without service mesh

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }}"
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
    strategy: canary
    action: deploy
    percentage: 20

To promote/reject the canary created by the above snippet, the following YAML snippet could be used:

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }}"
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
    strategy: canary
    action: promote # substitute reject if you want to reject

Canary deployment based on Service Mesh Interface

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }}"
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
    strategy: canary
    action: deploy
    traffic-split-method: smi
    percentage: 20
    baseline-and-canary-replicas: 1

To promote/reject the canary created by the above snippet, the following YAML snippet could be used:

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }} "
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
    strategy: canary
    traffic-split-method: smi
    action: reject # substitute reject if you want to reject

Blue-Green deployment with different route methods

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }}"
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
      ingress.yml
    strategy: blue-green
    action: deploy
    route-method: ingress # substitute with service/smi as per need
    version-switch-buffer: 15

To promote/reject the green workload created by the above snippet, the following YAML snippet could be used:

- uses: Azure/[email protected]
  with:
    namespace: "myapp"
    images: "contoso.azurecr.io/myapp:${{ event.run_id }}"
    imagepullsecrets: |
      image-pull-secret1
      image-pull-secret2
    manifests: |
      deployment.yaml
      service.yaml
      ingress-yml
    strategy: blue-green
    route-method: ingress # should be the same as the value when action was deploy
    action: promote # substitute reject if you want to reject

End to end workflows

Following are a few examples of not just this action, but how this action could be used along with other container and k8s related actions for building images and deploying objects onto k8s clusters:

Build container image and deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service cluster

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master

      - uses: Azure/docker-login@v1
        with:
          login-server: contoso.azurecr.io
          username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}

      - run: |
          docker build . -t contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}
          docker push contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}

      - uses: azure/[email protected]

      # Set the target AKS cluster.
      - uses: Azure/aks-set-context@v1
        with:
          creds: "${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}"
          cluster-name: contoso
          resource-group: contoso-rg

      - uses: Azure/[email protected]
        with:
          container-registry-url: contoso.azurecr.io
          container-registry-username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          container-registry-password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}
          secret-name: demo-k8s-secret

      - uses: Azure/[email protected]
        with:
          action: deploy
          manifests: |
            manifests/deployment.yml
            manifests/service.yml
          images: |
            demo.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}
          imagepullsecrets: |
            demo-k8s-secret

Build container image and deploy to any Azure Kubernetes Service cluster

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master

      - uses: Azure/docker-login@v1
        with:
          login-server: contoso.azurecr.io
          username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}

      - run: |
          docker build . -t contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}
          docker push contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}

      - uses: azure/[email protected]

      - uses: Azure/k8s-set-context@v2
        with:
          kubeconfig: ${{ secrets.KUBE_CONFIG }}

      - uses: Azure/[email protected]
        with:
          container-registry-url: contoso.azurecr.io
          container-registry-username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          container-registry-password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}
          secret-name: demo-k8s-secret

      - uses: Azure/[email protected]
        with:
          action: deploy
          manifests: |
            manifests/deployment.yml
            manifests/service.yml
          images: |
            demo.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}
          imagepullsecrets: |
            demo-k8s-secret

Build image and add `dockerfile-path` label to it

We can use this image in other workflows once built.

on: [push]
env:
  NAMESPACE: demo-ns2

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master

      - uses: Azure/docker-login@v1
        with:
          login-server: contoso.azurecr.io
          username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}

      - run: |
          docker build . -t contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }} --label dockerfile-path=https://github.com/${{github.repo}}/blob/${{github.sha}}/Dockerfile
          docker push contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}

Use bake action to get manifests deploying to a Kubernetes cluster

on: [push]
env:
  NAMESPACE: demo-ns2

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master

      - uses: Azure/docker-login@v1
        with:
          login-server: contoso.azurecr.io
          username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}

      - uses: azure/[email protected]

      # Set the target AKS cluster.
      - uses: Azure/aks-set-context@v1
        with:
          creds: "${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}"
          cluster-name: contoso
          resource-group: contoso-rg

      - uses: Azure/[email protected]
        with:
          namespace: ${{ env.NAMESPACE  }}
          container-registry-url: contoso.azurecr.io
          container-registry-username: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          container-registry-password: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}
          secret-name: demo-k8s-secret

      - uses: azure/k8s-bake@v2
        with:
          renderEngine: "helm"
          helmChart: "./aks-helloworld/"
          overrideFiles: "./aks-helloworld/values-override.yaml"
          overrides: |
            replicas:2
          helm-version: "latest"
        id: bake

      - uses: Azure/[email protected]
        with:
          action: deploy
          manifests: ${{ steps.bake.outputs.manifestsBundle }}
          images: |
            contoso.azurecr.io/k8sdemo:${{ github.sha }}
          imagepullsecrets: |
            demo-k8s-secret

Traceability Fields Support

Environment variable HELM_CHART_PATHS is a list of helmchart files expected by k8s-deploy - it will be populated automatically if you are using k8s-bake to generate the manifests.
Use script to build image and add dockerfile-path label to it. The value expected is the link to the dockerfile: https://github.com/${{github.repo}}/blob/${{github.sha}}/Dockerfile. If your dockerfile is in the same repo and branch where the workflow is run, it can be a relative path and it will be converted to a link for traceability.
Run docker login action for each image registry - in case image build and image deploy are two distinct jobs in the same or separate workflows.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

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