Blue-Green Deployments

Blue-green deployments are a proven approach to reducing downtime caused while upgrading an environment. This is done by creating a parallel environment on which the new deployment can be installed. If a problem is detected, and after the new deployment is verified, traffic can be switched over with the option to rollback.

While blue-green is a valid strategy for deploying just about any software, there are always trade-offs. Not all environments have the same uptime requirements or the resources to properly perform blue-green deployments. In an OpenShift Container Platform environment, the most suitable candidate for blue-green deployments are the nodes. All user processes run on these systems and even critical pieces of OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure are self-hosted there. Uptime is most important for these workloads and the additional complexity of blue-green deployments can be justified. The exact implementation of this approach varies based on your requirements. Often the main challenge is having the excess capacity to facilitate such an approach.

Another lesser challenge is that the administrator must temporarily share the Red Hat software entitlements between the blue-green deployments or provide access to the installation content by means of a system such as Red Hat Satellite. This can be accomplished by sharing the consumer ID from the previous host.

A common practice is to scale the registry and router pods until they are migrated to the green nodes. For these pods, a canary deployment approach is commonly used. Scaling them up will make them immediately active on the new nodes. Pointing the deployment configuration to the new image initiates a rolling update. However, because of node anti-affinity, and the fact that the blue nodes are still unschedulable, the deployments to the old nodes will fail. At this point, the registry and router deployments can be scaled down to the original number of pods. At any given point, the original number of pods is still available so no capacity is lost.

In order for pods to be migrated from the blue environment to the green, the images must be pulled. Network latency and load on the registry can cause delays if there is not sufficient capacity built in to the environment. Often, the best way to minimize impact to the running system is to trigger new pod deployments that will land on the new nodes. Accomplish this by importing new image streams.

A major release of OpenShift Container Platform is the motivation for a blue-green deployment. At that time, new image streams become available for users of Source-to-Image (s2i). Upon import, any builds or deployments configured with ImageChangeTriggers are automatically created.

It is important to realize that this process can trigger a large number of builds. The good news is that the builds are performed on the green nodes and, therefore, do not impact any traffic on the blue deployment.

To monitor build progress across all namespaces (projects) in the cluster:

In large environments, builds rarely completely stop. However, you should see a large increase and decrease caused by the administrative import.

Another benefit of triggering the builds is that it does a fairly good job of fetching the majority of the ancillary images to all nodes such as the various build images, the pod infrastructure image, and deployers. Everything else can be moved over using node evacuation and will proceed more quickly as a result.

For larger deployments, it is possible to have other labels that help determine how evacuation can be coordinated. The most conservative approach for avoiding downtime is to evacuate one node at a time. If services are composed of pods using zone anti-affinity, then an entire zone can be evacuated at once. It is important to ensure that the storage volumes used are available in the new zone as this detail can vary among cloud providers.

In OpenShift Enterprise 3.2 and later, a node evacuation is triggered whenever the service is stopped. Achieve manual evacuation and deletion of all blue nodes at once by: