Orkestra

Orkestra is a cloud-native release orchestration platform that allows you to manage the lifecycle and orchestrate the release of groups of Kubernetes Helm applications through Kubernetes Custom Resource Objects. Orkestra works by generating dependency driven DAG workflows to orchestrate the deployment and upgrade of multiple applications within a Kubernetes cluster. Additionally, Orkestra can also orchestrate the deployment of multiple microservice (helm dependencies - sub-charts) within a parent Helm chart.

Overview

What is it?

Orkestra renders a DAG based workflow for deploying applications to a Kubernetes cluster by leveraging popular and mature open-source frameworks like Argo (Workflows), Flux Helm Operator and Chart-museum

What problems does it solve?

Complex applications oftentimes require intelligent release orchestration and lifecycle management which is not provided by Helm itself.

Take, for example, Continuous Deployment of mission-critical applications - like 5G core Network Functions or NFs

• Network Functions are applications that rely on a rich ecosystem of infrastructure and PaaS (platform-as-a-service) components to be present on the cluster before they can be deployed. This establishes a hard dependency between the applications and the infra/paas applications.

How it works

To solve the complex application orchestration problem Orkestra builds a Directed Acyclic Graph using the application, and it's dependencies and submits it to Argo Workflow. The Workflow nodes use workflow-executor nodes to deploy a HelmRelease object into the cluster. This HelmRelease object signals Flux's HelmOperator to perform a "Helm Action" on the referenced chart.

1. Submit Application and ApplicationGroup CRs
2. For each Application in ApplicationGroup download Helm chart from “primary” Helm Registry
3. (*optional) For each dependency in the Application chart, if dependency chart is embedded in charts/ directory, push to ”staging” Helm Registry (Chart-museum).
4. Generate and submit Argo Workflow DAG
5. (Executor nodes only) Submit and probe deployment state of HelmRelease CR.
6. Fetch and deploy Helm charts referred to by each HelmRelease CR to the Kubernetes cluster. (*optional) Embedded subcharts are fetched from the “staging” registry instead of the “primary/remote” registry.

Sequence Diagram

See sequence diagrams

Features

• Built for Kubernetes - custom controller built using the kubebuilder project
• Easy to use - familiar declarative spec using Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions
• Dependency management - DAG-based workflows for groups of application charts and their sub-charts using Argo Workflow
• Works with any Continous Deployment system - bring your own CD to deploy Orkestra Custom Resources. Works with any Kubernetes compatible Continuous Deployment framework like FluxCD and ArgoCD.
• Built for GitOps - describe your desired set of applications (and dependencies) declaratively and manage them from a version-controlled git repository.

Contributing

For instructions about setting up your environment to develop and extend the operator, please see contributing.md

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Reporting security issues and security bugs

For instructions on reporting security issues and bugs, please see security.md