What is Clowder?

Clowder is a kubernetes operator designed to make it easy to deploy applications running on the cloud.redhat.com platform in production, testing and local development environments.

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See Clowder in Action

Why use Clowder?

In addition to reducing the effort to maintain a deployment template, Clowder provides a number of other benefits:

• Consistent deployment Whether you’re deploying to production, running smoke tests on a PR, or developing your application locally, Clowder will use the same app definition for all three. No more endlessly tweaking environment variables!

• Focus on development Clowder has the best practices of running an app in a microservices environment as well as specific requirements from the app-sre team, such as pod affinity, rollout parameters etc built-in. Spend less time worrying about configuring deployment templates and more time writing your app.

• Assisting Ops Any dev or SRE that learns how Clowder deploys apps will implicitly understand the deployment of any other app utilizing Clowder.

• Deploy a full environment locally Gone are the days of hacking together scripts that just about get you mocked or partially working dependant services. With Clowder, you can deploy an instance of the cloud.redhat.com platform on your local laptop, or in a dev cluster to use as you wish.

Clowder will provision resources depending on the mode choosen for each provider, and will return a consistently formatted JSON configuration document for each app to consume, leaving teams to focus more on writing code than differences between environments. The Clowder config client can assist with this and currently has support for Python, Go, Javascript and Ruby.

Feature List

Clowder currently features support for:

• Kafka Topics

• Object Storage

• PostgreSQL Database

• In-Memory DB

• Feature Flags

• CronJob support

• Jobs Support

• Istio integration

• TLS Sidecar

• Simple Autoscaling

Roadmap

Our current roadmap looks like this:

• Autoscaling (possibly via Keda)

• Dynamic routing for public web sevices

• Automatic metrics configuration

• Automatic network policy configuration

• Standard, configurable alerting: Error rate, latency, Kafka topic lag, etc

• Canary deployments (possibly via Flagger)

• Operational remediations

• Observe service status from a ClowdApp status, based on sevice dependencies.

• Advanced logging configurations (e.g. logging messages to kafka topics)

Getting Clowder

Clowder is already running in pre-prod/prod environments.

To run Clowder locally in Minikube, obtain and install Minikube.

Clowder is developed on Fedora and the kvm driver has been found to work best initiated with the following options:

minikube start --cpus 4 --disk-size 36GB --memory 16000MB --driver=kvm2 --addons registry --addons ingress  --addons=metrics-server --disable-optimizations

ℹ️	Mac OS is also supported with the virtualbox and hyperkit drivers. A full guide can be found here

To persist these changes for every minikube invocation, run the following:

minikube config set cpus 4
minikube config set memory 16000
minikube config set disk-size 36GB
minikube config set driver kvm2

If you encounter any kvm issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting guide

The kube_setup.sh script then needs to be run by invoking

./build/kube_setup.sh

Clowder can then be installed by running:

# Be sure to get the latest release in the link above!
minikube kubectl -- apply -f $(curl https://api.github.com/repos/RedHatInsights/clowder/releases/latest | jq '.assets[0].browser_download_url' -r) --validate=false

Usage

To use Clowder to deploy an application a ClowdEnvironment resource must be present to define an environment. Once this has been deployed, a ClowdApp resource is authored for the app and deployed alongside the ClowdEnvironment.

Example app developer workflow:

1. Install Clowder on a minikube environment.

2. Use kubectl apply -f clowdenv.yaml to apply a ClowdEnvironment resource to the cluster.

3. Use kubectl apply -f clowdapp.yaml to apply a ClowdApp resource to the cluster.

More details on how to do this are present in the Getting Started section of the documentation.

API Reference

Building Clowder

If you want to run a version of Clowder other than the released version there are a few prerequisites you will need. To learn about developing Clowder please visit the developing clowder page for more detailed instructions.

History

To understand more about the design decisions made while developing Clowder, please visit the design document

Connect

Any questions, please ask one of the Clowder development team

• @psav

• @bsquizz

• @bennyturns

• @adamrdrew