In this tutorial you'll get a full tour through Keptn. Before we get started you'll get to know what you will learn while you walk yourself through this tutorial.

What we will cover

You'll find a time estimate until the end of this tutorial in the right top corner of your screen - this should give you guidance how much time is needed for each step.

In this tutorial, we are going to install Keptn on a Kubernetes cluster, along with Istio for traffic routing and ingress control.

The full setup that we are going to deploy is sketched in the following image.
demo setup

Keptn can be installed on a variety of Kubernetes distributions. Please find a full compatibility matrix for supported Kubernetes versions here.

Please find tutorials how to set up your cluster here. For the best tutorial experience, please follow the sizing recommendations given in the tutorials.

Please make sure your environment matches these prerequisites:

Download the Istio command line tool by following the official instructions or by executing the following steps.

curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=1.8.2 sh -

Check the version of Istio that has been downloaded and execute the installer from the corresponding folder, e.g.,

./istio-1.8.2/bin/istioctl install

The installation of Istio should be finished within a couple of minutes.

This will install the Istio default profile with ["Istio core" "Istiod" "Ingress gateways"] components into the cluster. Proceed? (y/N) y
✔ Istio core installed
✔ Istiod installed
✔ Ingress gateways installed
✔ Installation complete

Every release of Keptn provides binaries for the Keptn CLI. These binaries are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

There are multiple options how to get the Keptn CLI on your machine.

Now, you should be able to run the Keptn CLI:

To install the latest release of Keptn with full quality gate + continuous delivery capabilities in your Kubernetes cluster, execute the keptn install command.

keptn install --endpoint-service-type=ClusterIP --use-case=continuous-delivery

Installation details

In the Keptn namespace, the following deployments should be found:

kubectl get deployments -n keptn

Here is the output of the command:

NAME                          READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
api-gateway-nginx             1/1     1            1           2m44s
api-service                   1/1     1            1           2m44s
approval-service              1/1     1            1           2m44s
bridge                        1/1     1            1           2m44s
configuration-service         1/1     1            1           2m44s
helm-service                  1/1     1            1           2m44s
jmeter-service                1/1     1            1           2m44s
lighthouse-service            1/1     1            1           2m44s
litmus-service                1/1     1            1           2m44s
mongodb                       1/1     1            1           2m44s
mongodb-datastore             1/1     1            1           2m44s
remediation-service           1/1     1            1           2m44s
shipyard-controller           1/1     1            1           2m44s
statistics-service            1/1     1            1           2m44s

We are using Istio for traffic routing and as an ingress to our cluster. To make the setup experience as smooth as possible we have provided some scripts for your convenience. If you want to run the Istio configuration yourself step by step, please take a look at the Keptn documentation.

The first step for our configuration automation for Istio is downloading the configuration bash script from Github:

curl -o configure-istio.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keptn/examples/release-0.8.4/istio-configuration/configure-istio.sh

After that you need to make the file executable using the chmod command.

chmod +x configure-istio.sh

Finally, let's run the configuration script to automatically create your Ingress resources.

./configure-istio.sh

What is actually created

With this script, you have created an Ingress based on the following manifest.

---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: istio
  name: api-keptn-ingress
  namespace: keptn
spec:
  rules:
  - host: <IP-ADDRESS>.nip.io
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: api-gateway-nginx
            port:
              number: 80

Please be aware, when using OpenShift 3.11, instead of using the above manifest, use the following one, as it uses an already deprecated apiVersion.

---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: istio
  name: api-keptn-ingress
  namespace: keptn
spec:
  rules:
  - host: <IP-ADDRESS>.nip.io
    http:
      paths:
      - backend:
          serviceName: api-gateway-nginx
          servicePort: 80

Besides, the script has created a gateway resource for you so that the onboarded services are also available publicly.

---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: public-gateway
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  selector:
    istio: ingressgateway
  servers:
  - port:
      name: http
      number: 80
      protocol: HTTP
    hosts:
    - '*'

Besides, the helm-service pod of Keptn is restarted to fetch this new configuration.

In this section we are referring to the Linux/MacOS derivatives of the commands. If you are using a Windows host, please follow the official instructions.

KEPTN_ENDPOINT=http://$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')/api
KEPTN_API_TOKEN=$(kubectl get secret keptn-api-token -n keptn -ojsonpath='{.data.keptn-api-token}' | base64 --decode)

Use this stored information and authenticate the CLI.

keptn auth --endpoint=$KEPTN_ENDPOINT --api-token=$KEPTN_API_TOKEN

That will give you:

Starting to authenticate
Successfully authenticated

If you want, you can go ahead and take a look at the Keptn API by navigating to the endpoint that is given via

echo $KEPTN_ENDPOINT

api

A project in Keptn is the logical unit that can hold multiple (micro)services. Therefore, it is the starting point for each Keptn installation.

To get all files you need for this tutorial, please clone the example repo to your local machine.

git clone --branch release-0.8.4 https://github.com/keptn/examples.git --single-branch

cd examples/onboarding-carts

Create a new project for your services using the keptn create project command. In this example, the project is called sockshop. Before executing the following command, make sure you are in the examples/onboarding-carts folder.

Recommended: Create a new project with Git upstream:

To configure a Git upstream for this tutorial, the Git user (--git-user), an access token (--git-token), and the remote URL (--git-remote-url) are required. If a requirement is not met, go to the Keptn documentation where instructions for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket are provided.

Let's define the variables before running the command:

GIT_USER=gitusername
GIT_TOKEN=gittoken
GIT_REMOTE_URL=remoteurl

Now let's create the project using the keptn create project command.

keptn create project sockshop --shipyard=./shipyard.yaml --git-user=$GIT_USER --git-token=$GIT_TOKEN --git-remote-url=$GIT_REMOTE_URL

Alternatively: If you don't want to use a Git upstream, you can create a new project without it but please note that this is not the recommended way:

keptn create project sockshop --shipyard=./shipyard.yaml

For creating the project, the tutorial relies on a shipyard.yaml file as shown below:

apiVersion: "spec.keptn.sh/0.2.0"
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: "delivery-direct"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "direct"
            - 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"
        - name: "rollback"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "staging.delivery.finished"
              selector:
                match:
                  result: "fail"
          tasks:
            - name: "rollback"
        - name: "delivery-direct"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "dev.delivery-direct.finished"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "direct"
            - name: "release"

    - name: "production"
      sequences:
        - name: "delivery"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "staging.delivery.finished"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "blue_green_service"
            - name: "release"
        - name: "rollback"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "production.delivery.finished"
              selector:
                match:
                  result: "fail"
          tasks:
            - name: "rollback"
        - name: "delivery-direct"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "staging.delivery-direct.finished"
          tasks:
            - name: "deployment"
              properties:
                deploymentstrategy: "direct"
            - name: "release"

        - name: "remediation"
          triggeredOn:
            - event: "production.remediation.finished"
              selector:
                match:
                  evaluation.result: "fail"
          tasks:
            - name: "get-action"
            - name: "action"
            - name: "evaluation"
              triggeredAfter: "15m"
              properties:
                timeframe: "15m"

This shipyard contains three stages: dev, staging, and production. This results in the three Kubernetes namespaces: sockshop-dev, sockshop-staging, and sockshop-production.

Let's take a look at the project that we have just created. We can find all this information in the Keptn's Bridge.
Therefore, we need the credentials that have been automatically generated for us.

keptn configure bridge --output

Now use these credentials to access it on your Keptn's Bridge.

echo http://$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')/bridge

You will find the just created project in the bridge with all stages.
bridgebridge

After creating the project, services can be onboarded to our project.

  1. Onboard the carts service using the keptn onboard service command:
    keptn onboard service carts --project=sockshop --chart=./carts
  2. After onboarding the service, tests (i.e., functional- and performance tests) need to be added as basis for quality gates in the different stages:
    • Functional tests for dev stage:
    keptn add-resource --project=sockshop --stage=dev --service=carts --resource=jmeter/basiccheck.jmx --resourceUri=jmeter/basiccheck.jmx
    • Performance tests for staging stage:
    keptn add-resource --project=sockshop --stage=staging --service=carts --resource=jmeter/load.jmx --resourceUri=jmeter/load.jmx
    Note: You can adapt the tests in basiccheck.jmx as well as load.jmx for your service. However, you must not rename the files because there is a hardcoded dependency on these file names in the current implementation of Keptn's jmeter-service.

Since the carts service requires a mongodb database, a second service needs to be onboarded.

Take a look in your Keptn's Bridge and see the newly onboarded services.
bridge services

After onboarding the services, a built artifact of each service can be deployed.

  1. Deploy the carts-db service by executing the keptn trigger delivery command:
    keptn trigger delivery --project=sockshop --service=carts-db --image=docker.io/mongo --tag=4.2.2 --sequence=delivery-direct
  2. Deploy the carts service by specifying the built artifact, which is stored on DockerHub and tagged with version 0.13.1:
    keptn trigger delivery --project=sockshop --service=carts --image=docker.io/keptnexamples/carts --tag=0.13.1
  3. Go to Keptn's Bridge and check which events have already been generated.
    bridge
  4. Optional: Verify the pods that should have been created for services carts and carts-db:
    kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | grep carts-

    sockshop-dev          carts-77dfdc664b-25b74                            1/1     Running     0          10m
sockshop-dev          carts-db-54d9b6775-lmhf6                          1/1     Running     0          13m
sockshop-production   carts-db-54d9b6775-4hlwn                          2/2     Running     0          12m
sockshop-production   carts-primary-79bcc7c99f-bwdhg                    2/2     Running     0          2m15s
sockshop-staging      carts-db-54d9b6775-rm8rw                          2/2     Running     0          12m
sockshop-staging      carts-primary-79bcc7c99f-mbbgq                    2/2     Running     0          7m24s
  1. Get the URL for your carts service with the following commands in the respective namespaces:
    echo http://carts.sockshop-dev.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')

    echo http://carts.sockshop-staging.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')

    echo http://carts.sockshop-production.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')
  2. Navigate to the URLs to inspect the carts service. In the production namespace, you should receive an output similar to this:

carts in production

Now that the service is running in all three stages, let us generate some traffic so we have some data we can base the evaluation on.

Change the directory to examples/load-generation/cartsloadgen. If you are still in the onboarding-carts directory, use the following command or change it accordingly:

cd ../load-generation/cartsloadgen

Now let us deploy a pod that will generate some traffic for all three stages of our demo environment.

kubectl apply -f deploy/cartsloadgen-base.yaml

The output will look similar to this.

namespace/loadgen created
deployment.extensions/cartsloadgen created

Optionally, you can verify that the load generator has been started.

kubectl get pods -n loadgen

NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cartsloadgen-5dc47c85cf-kqggb   1/1     Running   0          117s

After creating a project and service, you can set up Prometheus monitoring and configure scrape jobs using the Keptn CLI.

Keptn doesn't install or manage Prometheus and its components. Users need to install Prometheus and Prometheus Alert manager as a prerequisite.

Execute the following steps to install prometheus-service

Optional: Verify Prometheus setup in your cluster

Prometheus is then available on localhost:8080/targets where you can see the targets for the service:
Prometheus targets

We are going to add the configuration for our SLIs in terms of an SLI file that maps the name of an indicator to a PromQL statement how to actually query it. Please make sure you are in the correct folder examples/onboarding-carts.

Prometheus SLI provider

During the evaluation of a quality gate, the Prometheus provider is required that is implemented by an internal Keptn service, the prometheus-service. This service will fetch the values for the SLIs that are referenced in an SLO configuration file.

We are going to add the configuration for our SLIs in terms of an SLI file that maps the name of an indicator to a PromQL statement how to actually query it. Please make sure you are in the correct folder examples/onboarding-carts.

keptn add-resource --project=sockshop --stage=staging --service=carts --resource=sli-config-prometheus-bg.yaml --resourceUri=prometheus/sli.yaml

For your information, the contents of the file are as follows:

---
spec_version: '1.0'
indicators:
  response_time_p50: histogram_quantile(0.5, sum by(le) (rate(http_response_time_milliseconds_bucket{handler="ItemsController.addToCart",job="$SERVICE-$PROJECT-$STAGE-canary"}[$DURATION_SECONDS])))
  response_time_p90: histogram_quantile(0.9, sum by(le) (rate(http_response_time_milliseconds_bucket{handler="ItemsController.addToCart",job="$SERVICE-$PROJECT-$STAGE-canary"}[$DURATION_SECONDS])))
  response_time_p95: histogram_quantile(0.95, sum by(le) (rate(http_response_time_milliseconds_bucket{handler="ItemsController.addToCart",job="$SERVICE-$PROJECT-$STAGE-canary"}[$DURATION_SECONDS])))

Keptn requires a performance specification for the quality gate. This specification is described in a file called slo.yaml, which specifies a Service Level Objective (SLO) that should be met by a service. To learn more about the slo.yaml file, go to Specifications for Site Reliability Engineering with Keptn.

Activate the quality gates for the carts service. Therefore, navigate to the examples/onboarding-carts folder and upload the slo-quality-gates.yaml file using the add-resource command:

Make sure you are in the correct folder examples/onboarding-carts. If not, change the directory accordingly, e.g., cd ../../onboarding-carts.

keptn add-resource --project=sockshop --stage=staging --service=carts --resource=slo-quality-gates.yaml --resourceUri=slo.yaml

This will add the SLO.yaml file to your Keptn - which is the declarative definition of a quality gate. Let's take a look at the file contents:

---
spec_version: "1.0"
comparison:
  aggregate_function: "avg"
  compare_with: "single_result"
  include_result_with_score: "pass"
  number_of_comparison_results: 1
filter:
objectives:
  - sli: "response_time_p95"
    key_sli: false
    pass:             # pass if (relative change <= 10% AND absolute value is < 600ms)
      - criteria:
          - "<=+10%"  # relative values require a prefixed sign (plus or minus)
          - "<600"    # absolute values only require a logical operator
    warning:          # if the response time is below 800ms, the result should be a warning
      - criteria:
          - "<=800"
    weight: 1
total_score:
  pass: "90%"
  warning: "75%"

You can take a look at the currently deployed version of our "carts" microservice before we deploy the next build of our microservice.

  1. Get the URL for your carts service with the following commands in the respective stages:
    echo http://carts.sockshop-dev.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')

    echo http://carts.sockshop-staging.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')

    echo http://carts.sockshop-production.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')
  2. Navigate to http://carts.sockshop-production.YOUR.DOMAIN for viewing the carts service in your production environment and you should receive an output similar to the following:

carts service
  1. Use the Keptn CLI to deploy a version of the carts service, which contains an artificial slowdown of 1 second in each request.
    keptn trigger delivery --project=sockshop --service=carts --image=docker.io/keptnexamples/carts --tag=0.13.2
  2. Go ahead and verify that the slow build has reached your dev and staging environments by opening a browser for both environments. Get the URLs with these commands:
    echo http://carts.sockshop-dev.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')

    echo http://carts.sockshop-staging.$(kubectl -n keptn get ingress api-keptn-ingress -ojsonpath='{.spec.rules[0].host}')

carts service

carts service

After triggering the deployment of the carts service in version v0.13.2, the following status is expected:

Take a look in the Keptn's bridge and navigate to the last deployment. You will find a quality gate evaluation that got a fail result when evaluation the SLOs of our carts microservice. Thanks to this quality gate the slow build won't be promoted to production but instead automatically rolled back.

To verify, the Keptn's Bridge shows the deployment of v0.13.2 and then the failed test in staging including the roll-back.

Keptn's bridge
  1. Use the Keptn CLI to send a new version of the carts artifact, which does not contain any slowdown:
    keptn trigger delivery --project=sockshop --service=carts --image=docker.io/keptnexamples/carts --tag=0.13.3
  2. To verify the deployment in production (it may take a couple of minutes), open a browser and navigate to the carts service in your production environment. As a result, you see Version: v3.
  3. Besides, you can verify the deployments in your Kubernetes cluster using the following commands:
    kubectl get deployments -n sockshop-production

    NAME            DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
carts-db        1         1         1            1           63m
carts-primary   1         1         1            1           98m

    kubectl describe deployment carts-primary -n sockshop-production

    ...
Pod Template:
Labels:  app=carts-primary
Containers:
  carts:
    Image:      docker.io/keptnexamples/carts:0.13.3
  4. Take another look into the Keptn's Bridge and you will see this new version passed the quality gate and thus, is now running in production!

Thanks for taking a full tour through Keptn!
Although Keptn has even more to offer that should have given you a good overview what you can do with Keptn.

What we've covered

Keptn can be easily extended with external tools such as notification tools, other SLI providers, bots to interact with Keptn, etc.
While we do not cover additional integrations in this tutorial, please feel fee to take a look at our integration repositories:

Please visit us in our Keptn Slack and tell us how you like Keptn and this tutorial! We are happy to hear your thoughts & suggestions!

Also, make sure to follow us on Twitter to get the latest news on Keptn, our tutorials and newest releases!