GitLab Distribution Team Demos, 16 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Sept 2020 Orchestrator AMA Pre-Video

Description

Brief Introduction to Orchestrator and Demo.

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Hello, everyone and welcome to the pre-video with september 2020. Orchestrator, ask me anything. My name is robert marshall and I'm the engineer leading the orchestrator project here at gitlab.

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I'll give a very brief introduction to the orchestrator project today, for those who may not yet be familiar with it and a demonstration of the work completed so far in the 13.4 milestone, the orchestrator project exists to provide the most minimal way possible for an administrator to deploy gitlab using our reference architectures in the 13.4 milestone, we've been working to implement the 2k reference architecture, and that is what we'll be demonstrating today.

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On the left hand, side of my screen are the secrets required to configure that deployment and, on the right hand, side is where we'll run the actual demonstration.

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Let's take a look at the configuration files required to make our deployment today we are deploying the 2k reference architecture. So, let's take a look at our topology file. This is going to be the name of the site, and this is how we say: we're deploying 2k users.

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Let's take a look at where that topology file would get referenced.

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I'm going to be opening up a sanitized version of my configuration file because I have api token keys in mind.

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Here's the alignment topology file.

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Orchestrator currently deploys only to google cloud, we will eventually support aws and azure, but that's not planned for the alpha release, which is on november, coming in november.

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The information about your cluster data stored for this demonstration in the gcs backend, that's google, but you can also use git labs, terraform backend. If you choose that is fully supported in the 13.4 milestone. We found that the omnibus has a race condition that we needed to fix. This is pulling that package build for the fix, because it's not in the main line. It will should deliver with 13.4 release and then orchestrator currently sets most passwords for you. These are some holdouts from the very early days. This is just technical debt.

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Eventually, you will not need to set these. It will set them for you and that's all the configuration that you need to care about. So what's next! Well, let's go ahead and close out of this file.

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Clear, our screens we're ready to go.

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Now I have already built the container, so this is going to go rather quickly for this step.

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And once that's all built, I'm going to go ahead and enter the container.

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And there we are once we're inside the container, let's go ahead and deploy all the virtual machines that we're going to configure. This is where that topology file comes into play.

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On the right hand, side you'll see in the demo window that we have machine spinning up. This is output from terraform and what it's doing is creating the 2k reference architecture.

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And when it's all done we're going to get a list of, as you see, the external ip addresses the host names and the internal ip addresses, as well as just a confirmation of what we deployed. The next step is to build some information about that cluster. To be ready to orchestrate this step will probably go away or become simplified, but for now we just need to run assemble inventory.

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Now what this is actually doing is this is getting information about what the remote ssh keys are how to connect it's going to print out all this information on screen. This is how we know that we're done, and now we're ready to run orchestration.

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Now, let's go ahead and configure our deployment to do that, we're in run orchestration and I like to see how long things take. So I'm just going to turn this to the full screen and hit go with the tac-t option.

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That's going to run a timer.

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Now this will take roughly about 10 minutes, so I'm not going to make y'all sit through and watch this go for 10 minutes, but that's what it takes to deploy. Gitlab and again, this is the 2k reference architecture.

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Now the cool thing with orchestrator, just while it's running is that, let's just say that later, once we get to the alpha release, let's say you want to do an upgrade. The alpha release, we're going to upgrade from one point revision to another, and all you have to do for that step is run orchestration this step because once you've configured it, you have all the information saved.

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All you have to do is run orchestrate from here on out, so that process end to end.

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It takes about I'd, say 10, 15 minutes to run the configuration files to read through the documentation, get it together and then, with this longest. I've seen this take is about 12 minutes. If you want to deploy the full geo architecture where you have a primary and a secondary site that takes around 15 to 18 minutes, but again, that's for the entire thing. That's if you've ever had to do that deployment you have to copy around the gitlab secrets, json file, all the steps to take.

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All of that is handled for you. The only thing that's different between geo and the 2k reps architecture is a topology.

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File just like that, so again, I'm not going to make y'all wait for all this to run, but on the right hand, side that'll get done about another nine minutes and we will have the entirety of the two characters: architecture, less the monitor and the ancient proxy node. The load balancer we're looking forward to seeing you in the ask me anything and take a look at the document. There'll be some links to the latest and greatest of what we're doing in orchestrator have a great day and we'll see you in the ask me anything.