Using Azure DevOps with Openshift

I am assuming that you already know what Azure DevOps and Openshift are. Let me tell you about my Azure pipeline.

You can watch my Youtube demo here:

1 Youtube Videos On the Topic

Before creating this pipeline, I watched a number of Youtube videos on the subject to ensure that I am not repeating something that has been done time and time again. These videos have 3 things in common, they:

Deploy a simple application resulting in a single container
Use Openshift Source-to-image toolkit to build container images on Openshift
Need to execute many commands on Openshift before the pipeline will work eg, creating new projects and manifests which define the resources required by the application, etc.

2 Doing Things Differently

The 3 common things identified in the previous section are not necessarily bad things. I just want to do things differently. Hence I:

Build and deploy a more realistic application consisting of a Java microservice and a MySQL database
Build the container image in the pipeline and push it directly to the Openshift image registry. This is achieved by using the Maven Google jib plugin.
My pipeline takes cares of tasks needed on Openshift for the deployment of my microservice and MySQL database.

Here is a pictorial representation of my Azure DevOps YAML pipeline:

Starting from the botton left corner, a developer creates/changes code and pushes the code to the Azure Repository. Changes in the repo trigger the pipeline. The pipeline consists of 3 stages:

CI build - builds an image, performs some tests and pushes the image directly to the Openshift Image Registry
CD Dev - creates a project to simulate a Dev environment, processes manifests to create a MySQL database and initialises it with database tables required by the microservice. It then deploys the MySQL database and the microservice on Openshift
CD Prod - similar to CD Dev but it requires my approval to start this stage of the pipeline to deploy to the Prod environment.

3 Adapting My Azure Pipline to Run in Your Environment

3.1 On Openshift:

Since I am pushing the image built in the CI-Build pipeline stage directly to the Openshift image registry, I have to make sure that there is a route to access the registry from outside of Openshift. Login as a cluster admin and issue the command:

oc get route default-route -n openshift-image-registry --template='{{ .spec.host }}';echo
default-route-openshift-image-registry.apps-crc.testing

If it displays a route to the image registry, that means you are good to go and you can skip the following commands:

oc patch configs.imageregistry.operator.openshift.io/cluster --patch '{"spec":{"defaultRoute":true}}' --type=merge

oc get route default-route -n openshift-image-registry --template='{{ .spec.host }}';echo
default-route-openshift-image-registry.apps-crc.testing

The second command displays the route to access Openshift's image registry. This confirms that a route has been created to access the image registry from outside of Openshift.

3.2 On Azure DevOps:

Do the following:

Replace the secret variables: "FROM_USERNAME" and "FROM_PASSWORD" with your login to access registry.access.redhat.com to get the base image for the microservice.
I am using my self-hosted agent in the "mrdreambot pipelines" pool to execute the pipeline. You may either change it to use your own self-hosted agent or a microsoft hosted agent. For the former, please note that you must have Java JDK, maven, and oc installed on my self-hosted agent.

	pool:
	  mrdreambot pipelines

From your Azure project, click on "Project Settings" at the bottom left corner of the page and then select "Service Connections" on the left-hand pane and change the "Service URL", "Username" and "Password" to login in to a normal Openshift user account ie, no special priveleges are required. See screenshots below:
Change the "TO_REGISTRY" variable in the "variables" section near the top of the YAML pipeline to point to the route to access your Openshift image registry.