PCF 101 Series: Articulate + Attendee

Both Articulate and Attendee applications are sample applications built with Spring Boot.

The main purposes here are to demonstrate some of Pivotal Cloud Foundry's interesting capacity. Some scenarios like below will be covered:

1. Lightning fast of application deployment by cf push

2. Service mindset by cf create-service

3. Blue-green deployment

Meanwhile, I also create the CI / CD pipelines for articulate application by using Concourse.

To run the applications locally

$ git clone https://github.com/brightzheng100/pcf101-articulate-attendee.git
$ cd pcf101-articulate-attendee

$ ./mvnw spring-boot:run -f articulate/pom.xml
$ ./mvnw spring-boot:run -f attendee/pom.xml

Now, the articulate webapp is already serving on port 8080 and the backend app attendee, providing RESTful services for articulate, will be serving on port 8181, which is exactly the default setting in articulate.

Go to the http://localhost:8080 in your browser and you should see below screen:

To Run on Cloud Foundry

Assuming you have logged into your Cloud Foundry targeting the proper organization and space.

$ ./mvnw package

$ cf push -f attendee/manifest.yml
$ cf push -f articulate/manifest.yml

Now they're working independently. Copy the route generated for attendee app and it's time to let articulate app talks to attendee service:

$ cf cups pcf101-demo-attendee-service -p uri
    uri> <KEY IN URL OF ATTENDEE APP + "/attendees" AND ENTER, e.g. https://pcf101-demo-attendee.apps.mycompany.com/attendees>
$ cf bind-service pcf101-demo-articulate pcf101-demo-attendee-service
$ cf restage pcf101-demo-articulate

You can visit the articulate app by visiting the route generated:

Tips:

1. It's recommended to try it out in Pivotal Web Services
2. To simplify the process, please refer to start.sh for how to make all these in one simple command
3. Please refer to articulate/manifest-with-service.yml for how to add service binding directly within the yaml file so that the service binding process can be fully automated.

By default, the attendee app uses an embedded H2 database to persistent attendee records. If you want to use MySQL, it's just some commands away:

$ cf create-service <MYSQL SERVICE> <MYSQL PLAN> <MYSQL_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME>
$ cf bind-service pcf101-demo-attendee <MYSQL_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME>
$ cf restage pcf101-demo-attendee

Blue Green Deployment

As PCF has layered routing mechanism and provides powerful APIs for the routing control, blue-green deployment becomes very straightforward:

$ DOMAIN=<YOUR APPS DOMAIN>
$ cf push -f articulate/manifest-v2.yml --no-route
$ cf map-route pcf101-demo-articulate-v2 ${DOMAIN} -n pcf101-demo-articulate

$ cf scale pcf101-demo-articulate -i 1
$ cf scale pcf101-demo-articulate-v2 -i 3

$ cf unmap-route pcf101-demo-articulate ${DOMAIN} -n pcf101-demo-articulate

Eventually we can delete the old version of app and rename the new version:

$ cf delete pcf101-demo-articulate -f
$ cf rename pcf101-demo-articulate-v2 pcf101-demo-articulate

The articulate app provides good illustration about the blue-green process.

Tips:

1. This process can be significantly simplified if you use Autopilot CF plugin, see here;
2. Refer to bluegreen-autopilot.sh for how to use Autopilot to perform blue-green deployment

CI/CD By Concourse

There is CI/CD pipeline for Concourse built in.

To try it out:

$ vi ../_vars.yml
$ fly -t concourse set-pipeline -p pcf101-demo-articulate-attendee -c articulate/ci/pipeline.yml -l ../_vars.yml

Note: Below is the sample _vars.yml:

app-name: pcf101-demo-articulate
app-host: pcf101-demo-articulate

pcf-api: <PCF API ENDPOINT>
pcf-username: <PCF USER>
pcf-password: <PCF PASSWORD>
pcf-domain: <PCF APP DOMAIN>
pcf-organization: <PCF ORG>
pcf-space: <PCF SPACE>

Clean Up

To clean up the env, simply issue below commands:

$ cf delete pcf101-demo-articulate -r
$ cf delete pcf101-demo-attendee -r
$ cf delete-service pcf101-demo-attendee-service

Credits

This project is originated from https://github.com/pivotal-education/pcf-articulate-code