Shipyard

Declare Shipyard (before creating a project)

• A shipyard is defined at the level of a project. This means that all services in a project share the same shipyard definition.

• A shipyard defines the stages each deployment has to go through until it is released in the final stage, e.g., the production stage.

• A shipyard can consist of any number of stages; but at least one. A stage must have at least the name property.

• A stage can consist of any number of sequences; but at least one.

Definition of Stage

A stage is declared by its name. This name will be used for the branch in the Git repository and Kubernetes namespace to which services at this stage will be deployed to.

Example of a shipyard with three stages:

apiVersion: spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "dev"
    - name: "hardening"
    - name: "production"

Definition of Sequence in a Stage

After defining stages, sequences can be added to a stage. A sequence is an ordered list of tasks that are triggered sequentially. A sequence consists of the following properties:

• name: A unique name of the sequence
• triggeredOn (optional): An array of events that trigger the sequence.
• tasks: An array of tasks executed by the sequence in the declared order.

Example: Extended shipyard with a delivery sequence in all three stage:

apiVersion: spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "dev"
      sequences:
      - name: "delivery"
        tasks: 
        - name: "deployment"
        - name: "release"

    - name: "hardening"
      sequences:
      - name: "delivery"
        triggeredOn:
          - event: "dev.delivery.finished"
        tasks: 
        - name: "deployment"
        - name: "release"

    - name: "production"
      sequences:
      - name: "delivery"
        triggeredOn:
          - event: "hardening.delivery.finished"
        tasks: 
        - name: "deployment"
        - name: "release"

Reserved Keptn Tasks

Keptn supports a set of opinionated tasks for declaring a delivery or remediation sequence:

• action
• approval
• deployment
• evaluation
• get-action
• release
• rollback
• test

Action

The action task indicates that a remediation action should be executed by an action provider. It is used within a remediation workflow.

Usage:

- name: action

Approval

The approval task intercepts the sequence and waits for a required approval (e.g., before deploying an artifact into the next stage). The approval strategy can be defined based on the evaluation result pass and warning. Keptn supports the following approval strategies for the evaluation results pass and warning:

• automatic: The artifact is deployed automatically.
• manual: The user is asked for approval before triggering the deployment.

This allows combinations as follows:

Per default, an automatic approval strategy is used for evaluation result pass and warning.

Usage:

- name: approval
  properties: 
    pass: automatic
    warning: manual

apiVersion: spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
            - name: "approval"
              properties:
                pass: "manual"
                warning: "manual"
            - name: "release"

Deployment

Defines the deployment strategy (see Continuous Delivery) used to deploy a new version of a service. Keptn supports deployment strategies of type:

• direct: Deploys a new version of a service by replacing the old version of the service.
• blue_green_service: Deploys a new version of a service next to the old one. After a successful validation of this new version, it replaces the old one and is marked as stable (i.e., it becomes the primary-version).
• user_managed (experimental): Deploys a new version of a service by fetching the current helm-chart from the git repo, and just updating certain values.

Usage:

- name: deployment
  properties: 
    deploymentstrategy: blue_green_service

- name: deployment
  properties: 
    deploymentstrategy: direct

- name: deployment
  properties: 
    deploymentstrategy: user_managed

Evaluation

Defines the quality evaluation that is executed to verify the quality of a deployment based on its SLOs/SLIs.

Usage:

- name: evaluation

Get-Action

The get-action task is used to extract the desired remediation action from a remediation.yaml within a remediation workflow.

Usage:

- name: get-action

Release

Defines the releasing task that is executed after a successful deployment happened. This means that production traffic is shifted towards the new deployment in this task.

Usage:

- name: release

Action

Defines the execution of a remediation action retrieved by get-action.

Usage:

- name: action

Rollback

Defines the rollback task that is executed when a rollback shall be triggered.

Usage:

- name: rollback

Test

Defines the test strategy used to validate a deployment. Keptn supports tests of type:

• functional: Test a deployment based on functional tests.
• performance: Test a deployment based on performance/load tests.

Usage:

- name: test
  properties: 
    teststrategy: functional

apiVersion: spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "dev"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "direct"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

    - name: "staging"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "dev.delivery.finished"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "performance"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

Updating a Shipyard

This section provides examples on how to update a shipyard file.

Add/Remove a task to/from a task sequence

If you want to add or remove an additional task to a sequence, you can do this by adding/removing the task directly in the shipyard:

Initial shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

Use-case: To intervene in the delivery process, I would like to add an approval task before the release task.

Updated shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "approval"
            - name: "release"

Result: The next time this sequence gets triggered by Keptn, the task will be executed meaning that a sh.keptn.event.[task].triggered event is sent out. Make sure to have a Keptn-service that listens to this event type and can execute it.

Add/Remove a task sequence to/from a stage

If you want to add or remove an additional task sequence to a stage, you can do this by adding/removing the sequence directly in the shipyard:

Initial shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

Use-case 1: I would like to add an additional delivery process to the production stage that allows rolling-out a hotfix without testing and evaluation.

Updated shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

        - name: "hotfix-delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "release"

Result: After extending the shipyard as shown above, you can trigger this sequence using:

keptn trigger delivery --project=<project> --service=<service> --image=<image> --tag=<tag> --sequence=hotfix-delivery

Use-case 2: I would like to add a remediation sequence to the production stage that allows executing remediation actions when problems occur.

Updated shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"


        - name: "remediation"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "production.remediation.finished"
              selector:
                match:
                  evaluation.result: "fail"
          tasks:
            - name: "get-action"
            - name: "action"
            - name: "evaluation"
              triggeredAfter: "10m"
              properties:
                timeframe: "10m"

Result: After extending the shipyard as shown above, remediations should be executed when a problem event is retrieved (see remediation workflow).

Define a trigger for a sequence

An advanced and powerful feature of the shipyard is that you can define triggers to kick-off a sequence. Therefore, a sequence offers the triggeredOn property where a list of events can be specified. The event type you can list there are events that refer to the status of a sequence execution. Their name follows the pattern:

• [stage_name].[sequence_name].finished

Note: It is not required to specify the full qualified event name which would be sh.keptn.event.[stage_name].[sequence_name].finished in this case

Besides, a match selector can be added to an event that works as a filter on the result property of the event. Consequently, you can filter based on sequence executions that failed or passed, shown by the next example that filters on failed:

sequences:
  - name: "rollback"
    triggeredOn:
      - event: "production.delivery.finished"
        selector:
          match:
            result: failed

Initial shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

Use-case: I would like to add a process (additional sequence) that covers a failed delivery in the production stage by a notification and rollback task.

Updated shipyard:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.3"
kind: "Shipyard"
metadata:
  name: "shipyard-sockshop"
spec:
  stages:
    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "test"
              properties:
                teststrategy: "functional"
            - name: "evaluation"
            - name: "release"

        - name: "rollback"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "production.delivery.finished"
                selector:
                  match:
                    result: failed
          tasks:
            - name: "notification"
            - name: "rollback"

Result: When, for example, the delivery sequence failed due to a failed test task, the event sh.keptn.event.production.delivery.finished with result=failed is sent out. Consequently, the rollback sequence is triggered based on the configuration of the triggeredOn and selector.