Dynamic Environment

DynamicEnv is an innovative Kubernetes operator designed to empower developers by simplifying the process of launching on-demand environments. At its core, DynamicEnv offers a streamlined approach to deploying and testing different versions of specific services within a shared Kubernetes cluster.

It effectively deals with the issues mentioned by creating special versions just for the services being tested. At the same time, it makes smart use of the 'production' versions for the rest of the environment, ensuring efficient resource use. The traffic is cleverly directed, sending 'real' users to the 'production' version of services and directing the traffic of a test user to the specific test version.

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Development Setup

This section describes how to create a working environment for developing Dynamic Environment. While it's not mandatory to follow these instructions or use the same tools, it's highly recommended to keep the versions and some installation procedures (e.g., Istio installation into kubernetes) to make sure everything passes the tests correctly.

Tool Versions

In order to have consistent results across development, tests, etc. we use a specific version of each of the tools. The repository contains asdf configuration for each of the tools we use during development/testing. The tools and versions required are configured in the .tool-versions file at the top of the repository. Below is the procedure to install the required tool via asdf:

After installing asdf install the required plugins (it's safe to run this command even if some tools are already installed):

for tool in `cat .tool-versions |cut -d" " -f1`; do asdf plugin add $tool; done

Then run the following command in the root of the repository (again, it's safe to run this even if some tools are already installed):

asdf install

You should now have the right versions of the tools installed. As long as you installed asdf correctly, and you're running from within the repository root you'll be using the right versions.

Here are other tools that while not required, can make life easier:

• kubectl: Make sure it's a version that matches our cluster version according to the version skew policy (if you don't want to mess with multiple versions, and you're using minikube you can use minikube kubectl instead).
• kubectx and kubens: Will help you set the context and default namespace easily.
• k9s: A great tool for interacting with k8s from the command line. Check the website for usage.

Prepare task

Some of the development requirements are installed via the Makefile's prepare task. Run it to install requirements:

make prepare

Setting up Kubernetes

After we have the tools we need, it's time to install two kubernetes clusters. One for Development and one for running tests locally. Below is an optional suggestion for installing and configuring these clusters. Feel free to replace all the components except KInd (so your test setup will be as similar to the CI as possible).

Development Cluster

We will use minikube as our development cluster. Feel free to use whichever cluster suits you best, but try to preserve the kubernetes version.

After installing minikube, we need to start a new cluster. You can play a little with the memory and the cpus but since we're going to run resources on it, it's better to give it more resources than the default:

minikube start --kubernetes-version v1.26.3 --memory 8g --cpus 4

For the rest of the commands, make sure your kubectl is operating on the minikube context:

kubectx -c # should return 'minikube'

Next, install Istio:

istioctl install --set profile=demo -y

If you want some basic building blocks to play with, you can install a slightly modified version of the Istio BookInfo application, so you'll have some application to experiment on. This command will install BookInfo environment on a newly created services namespace. It will also apply required labels (note that if you're not using these resources you have to apply the istio-injection=enabled label on any namespace you want istio to operate on)`:

kubectl apply -n services -f dev-resources

# Alternatively, if you don't want to install these manifests you have to apply an istio label
# on each namespace you want istio to operate on
kubectl label namespace <NAMESPACE> istio-injection=enabled

Note: On Mac, minikube might start to use a lot of resources if left running for a couple of days. It's better to stop minikube when you're done working for the day.

Tests Cluster

Some tests should run against a dedicated cluster. It is recommended that you'll have a default named Kind cluster for testing.

A prerequisite for running Kind is a docker service. Make sure you have one installed (e.g., Rancher Desktop). Assuming you followed the instructions above you should have the right version of Kind installed.

Create the default Kind cluster:

./e2e-testing/scripts/setup.sh create

Install required dependencies and controller docker image:

./e2e-testing/scripts/setup.sh deps

`

From now on, make sure your k8s context points to the test cluster.

Deploy the controller to the cluster (this step should be repeated every time you update the controller code):

./e2e-testing/scripts/setup.sh deploy

If you want to clean up the test cluster, you can run one of the following commands:

# Undeploy the controller and dependencies
./e2e-testing/scripts/setup.sh down

# Completely delete the cluster
./e2e-testing/scripts/setup.sh delete

Running the Operator Locally for Development

The development cluster is meant to be used as a target for our development process. As such, it's missing some components:

• Validating webhook.
• Metrics

To run our development operator:

make install run

Note: if you run in development mode not using the Makefile add -zap-devel to your parameters for better development logging.

On another shell session you can deploy a sample dynamic-environment resource to see the effect:

kubectl create -f config/samples/riskified_v1alpha1_dynamicenv.yaml

This will install a dynamic-environment resource in the default namespace. Check the status and the various resources on the services' namespace.

Writing Tests

There are two types of tests for this controller:

• Unit Tests
• End-to-End Tests

Unit Tests

These are the regular go tests.

E2E Tests

These are tests against a real cluster (Kind). We write and run the tests using kuttl. Each Kuttl test should be located each in its own directory under ./e2e-testing/kuttl. Make sure you follow the rules for creating tests:

• Your first test manifest should create a new namespace (preferably named like your test directory) and all test resources (deployments, destination rules, virtual services, etc.) should be deployed to that namespace. If required, create more than one namespace. This will prevent collisions between test cases.
• Every namespace added (per the previous step) should contain an Istio namespace:

  apiVersion: v1
  kind: Namespace
  metadata:
    name: <NAME>
    labels:
      istio-injection: enabled

• The tested dynamic-environment yaml could be deployed to the default namespace (with resources pointing to the namespaces above).
• If there are any leftover namespaces in the cluster (should not happen - this problem was fixed in Kuttl) remove then manually.
• Add a Readme.md file in each test directory describing the test target (and optionally pointing to the relevant ticket).

You can run the specific test you're working on (<TEST_NAME> is the directory of the test):

kuttl test --start-kind=false -n default --timeout 20 ./e2e-testing/kuttl --test <TEST_NAME>

Running Tests

• Run all unit tests with: make test
• Run all E2E tests with: make kuttl

Running Linters

While we run default linters during our test stage, it's advisable to occasionally run other linters. These should not break the build (and not included in our configuration) and might contain a lot of false positives, however, you should occasionally run them to manually search for errors:

# get a list of linters (at the end of the output there are some convenient presets)
golangci-lint help linters

# run specific presets (e.g. complexity and error)
golangci-lint run -p complexity,error