Deploy Kubernetes resources to Amazon EKS using Azure DevOps

This pattern aims to provide guidance on how to deploy a containerized application to Amazon EKS cluster from Azure DevOps using Helm chart. The pattern can be further extended by modifying the pipeline template shared here to use the Azure pipelines service connection for AWS in order to query and use data from AWS Cloud.

Prerequisites

• AWS Account
• Amazon EKS Cluster with node instance role to pull content from ECR
• IAM user account with access to Amazon EKS Cluster
• Azure DevOps account
• AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps installed in Azure DevOps or on an on-premises Azure DevOps server
• Application to be deployed (A sample web app provided in this guide)

Get Started

Target Architecture

About the pipeline template

The pipline template composes of 3 templates:

1. Main Template - main_template.yaml

   This template acts as a central template referring other job templates. It also has a stage for initializing variables and checking existence of AWS resources (Amazon EKS Cluster and ECR repository) at the beginning of the pipeline execution.

   This is the only template which you may refer when consuming the pipeline template in this solution.

2. CI Job Template - ci_template.yaml

   This is a job template used by the main_template.yaml for:

   • Building Docker Image
   • Pushing Docker Image
   • Building Helm Chart
   • Pushing Helm

3. CD Job Template - cd_template.yaml

   This is another job template used by main_template.yaml. It is dependent on successful execution of CI stage and Init stage in main_template.yaml.

   It is used for:

   • Deploying the Helm Chart
   • Showing deployment output

These templates are organized in directory structure as below:

pipeline_templates/
├─ jobs_templates/
│  ├─ ci_template.yaml
│  ├─ cd_template.yaml
├─ main_template.yaml

How to setup the pipeline template

To use the pipeline template, follow this procedure:

1. Copy the following contents from this repo to your own Azure DevOps repo

   • Copy the pipeline templates folder as-is
     • pipeline_templates folder (including contents in sub-folders)
   • Copy the sample pipeline that refers the pipeline template
     • azure_pipeline.yaml file

   Here is an example to show the usage - azure_pipeline.yaml

2. Setup a New pipeline in your Azure DevOps

   • Go to Pipelines, and then select New pipeline.
   • Do the steps of the wizard by first selecting Azure repos git (YAML) as the location of your source code.
   • When you see the list of repositories, select your repository.
   • Select Existing Azure pipelines YAML file in the configure your pipeline section
   • Select the branch as master or main and the path as: /azure_pipeline.yaml. Click on the continue button
   • Replace the input parameter values for the mandatory fields in azure_pipeline.yaml to your needs:

     serviceConnectionName: Azure DevOps Service Connection name.
     awsRegion: Default region for AWS.
     awsEKSClusterName: Name of the Amazon EKS Cluster used for deployment.
     projectName: Name of the project. This should be same as the Helm chart name
     

   • Click on the dropdown menu beside the Run button and save the pipeline

3. Run the pipeline

   • Go to Pipelines, and then select the pipeline you just created
   • Click on the Run pipeline button
   • Click on the Run button

Pipeline template parameters

Input parameters

Name	Description	Default Value
serviceConnectionName	Azure DevOps Service Connection Name
awsRegion	Default region for AWS
awsEKSClusterName	Name of the Amazon EKS Cluster
awsEKSRegion	Region for EKS Cluster	${{ parameters.awsRegion }}
awsECRRegion	Region for ECR repository	${{ parameters.awsRegion }}
awsECRAccountId	Account ID where ECR Repository is created	AccountID of Service Connection
projectName	Name of the project. Used in naming of K8s resources & Helm Chart	"webapp"
K8sNamespace	K8s Namespace for deployment	${{ parameters.projectName }}
helmVersion	Version of Helm	"3.8.2"
imageName	Name of the container image	${{ parameters.projectName }}
imageTag	Image Tag for the container image to be generated	$(Build.BuildNumber)-image
helmChartVersion	Version number for the helm chart to be created	$(Build.BuildNumber)-helm
helmChartDirPath	Path of the directory containing the chart to be packaged, eg webapp/charts/webapp	./${{ parameters.projectName }}/charts/${{ parameters.projectName }}
dockerfilePath	Path of the Dockerfile, eg webapp/Dockerfile.	./${{ parameters.projectName }}/Dockerfile

Limitations

• Amazon EKS cluster is publicly available and may not suit all architectures.
  • For Private EKS cluster, please refer to Azure DevOps Self-Hosted Agents: Self-hosted Linux agents
• To use AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps for accessing AWS services, you need an AWS account and AWS credentials.
• Sample web app provided as a part of this pattern is only for example purpose. It is a web server (httpd), hosting a HTML file (index.html). The application is exposed via public load balancer with a Kubernetes service of type Loadbalancer over HTTP.

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.