Manage manifests in Cloud Deploy

This page describes how to configure Cloud Deploy to render the configuration for each target in a delivery pipeline.

Cloud Deploy uses Skaffold to render your Kubernetes manifests. The service supports rendering of raw manifests and more advanced manifest-management tools, such as Helm, Kustomize, and kpt.

The rendering process has two stages:

  1. The manifest-management tool generates the manifest.

  2. Skaffold substitutes the image references in the manifest with the images you want to deploy in your release.

This page includes configuration examples using Helm and Kustomize.

Using Skaffold to generate your configuration

If you don't already have a Skaffold configuration file (skaffold.yaml), you can use Skaffold to generate one for you, based on what's in your repository.

  1. Install Skaffold using Google Cloud CLI:

    gcloud components install skaffold

  2. Run skaffold init in the repository that contains your manifests:

    skaffold init --skip-build

This command creates a skaffold.yaml file in your repository. That file references the manifests in that repository. The contents look like this:

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta7 kind: Config metadata:  name: sample-app manifests:  rawYaml:  - k8s-manifests/deployment.yaml  - k8s-manifests/rbac.yaml  - k8s-manifests/redis.yaml  - k8s-manifests/service.yaml

Rendering raw manifests

Raw manifests are manifests that aren't managed by a tool like Helm or Kustomize, and therefore don't need any pre-processing before being hydrated and deployed to a cluster.

By default, Cloud Deploy uses skaffold render to render your Kubernetes manifests, replacing untagged image names with the tagged image names of the container images you're deploying. Then when you promote the release, Cloud Deploy uses skaffold apply to apply the manifests and deploy the images to your Google Kubernetes Engine cluster.

A manifests stanza from a basic configuration looks like this:

manifests:  rawYaml:  - PATH_TO_MANIFEST

See the Skaffold documentation for more information on what values can be passed here.

Rendering using Helm

You can use Cloud Deploy to render your Helm charts. To do so, you include Helm chart details in a deploy stanza in a Skaffold profile.

Each such definition looks like this:

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta7 kind: Config manifests:  helm:  releases:  - name: RELEASE_NAME  chartPath: PATH_TO_HELM_CHART

Where:

RELEASE_NAME is the name of the Helm chart instance for this release.

PATH_TO_HELM_CHART is the local path to a packaged Helm chart or an unpacked Helm chart directory.

You can use additional Helm configuration options, as described in the Skaffold documentation

Rendering using Kustomize

You can use Kustomize with Cloud Deploy. To do so, you point to the Kustomization files from within the deploy stanza in your skaffold.yaml profile configuration.

You include a separate Kustomize configuration for each target for which you're using Kustomize, under each corresponding profile in your skaffold.yaml.

Each such definition looks like this:

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta7 kind: Config manifests:  kustomize:  paths:  - PATH_TO_KUSTOMIZE

Where:

PATH_TO_KUSTOMIZE points to your Kustomization files. The default is ["."]

You can use additional Kustomize configuration options, as described in the Skaffold documentation

Configuring different manifests per target

Often each target needs a slightly different configuration. For example, you might have more replicas in your production deployments than in your staging deployments.

You can render a different set of manifests for each target by providing each variation as a different Skaffold profile.

Profiles with Raw manifests

When working with raw manifests you can point Cloud Deploy at a different file, depending on the target. You could configure that as follows:

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta7 kind: Config profiles:  - name: prod  manifests:  rawYaml:  - prod.yaml  - name: staging  manifests:  rawYaml:  - staging.yaml

Profiles with Kustomize

Here's an example skaffold.yaml that has different profiles for staging and production using Kustomize, where each profile points to a different Kustomization:

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta7 kind: Config profiles:  - name: prod  manifests:  kustomize:  paths:  - environments/prod  - name: staging  manifests:  kustomize:  paths:  - environments/staging

Profiles referenced in the delivery pipeline

These profiles, defined in skaffold.yaml, are referenced in the delivery pipeline config, per target:

serialPipeline:  stages:  - targetId: staging-target  profiles:  - staging  - targetId: prod-target  profiles:  - prod

Substitute a specific image when you create the release

Your manifest can use a placeholder for the image name, which you can substitute when you create your release.

Here's an example of a manifest with a placeholder for the image:

apiVersion: v1 kind: Deployment metadata:  name: getting-started  labels:  app: nginx spec:  replicas: 1  selector:  matchLabels:  app: nginx  template:  metadata:  labels:  app: nginx  spec:  containers:  - name: nginx  image: my-app-image

When you create your release, you can use the --images= flag to identify the specific image to deploy. For example, the following command creates a release and substitutes a SHA-qualified image name for the placeholder name:

gcloud deploy releases create test-release-001 \  --project=test-gke-using-deployment \  --region=us-central1 \  --delivery-pipeline=my-gke-demo-app-1 \  --images=my-app-image=gcr.io/google-containers/nginx@sha256:f49a843c290594dcf4d193535d1f4ba8af7d56cea2cf79d1e9554f077f1e7aaa

The resulting rendered manifest now has a reference to the specified image instead of my-app-image.

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