Remote deployment and CI with GitOps and Flux

This article describes how to deploy applications to your Arc-enabled AKS Edge Essentials cluster. The steps are as follows:

1. Point to your GitHub application to the Azure portal.
2. Push your application to your AKS Edge Essentials cluster by installing GitOps configuration.
3. Commit a change to your GitHub application and show that your app updates automatically.

Note

Make sure you have allocated at least 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU for the Linux VM as well as a service IP range greater than 0. You might also need a larger disk space than the default 10 GB, depending on your workloads.

Step 1: fork demo application repository

Go to the Azure Arc Jumpstart repository and fork it to your own GitHub account.

Step 2: create configuration

Now, go to your cluster in the Azure portal and select GitOps. Next, create a cluster-level configuration and a namespace-level configuration. Select Create and Flux version 2.

Cluster-level configuration

Attribute	Input
Configuration name	config-nginx
Namespace	ingress-nginx
Scope	Cluster
Source kind	Git repository
Repository URL	<URL of your fork>
Reference type	Branch
Branch	main
Repository type	Public
Sync interval	1
Sync timeout	10
Kustomization
Instance name	nginx
Path	./nginx/release
Sync interval	10
Sync timeout	10
Prune	Enabled
Force	Not enabled

Wait until the config-nginx has successfully been created and visible on your Azure portal GitOps before creating the namespace-level configuration (you can move on to creating the next configuration if the compliance is in a pending state).

Namespace-level configuration

Attribute	Input
Configuration name	config-helloarc
Namespace	hello-arc
Scope	Namespace
Source kind	Git Repository
Repository URL	<URL of your fork>
Reference type	Branch
Branch	main
Repository type	Public
Sync interval	1
Sync timeout	10
Kustomization
Instance name	app
Path	./hello-arc/releases/app
Sync interval	10
Sync timeout	10
Prune	Enabled
Force	Not enabled

Refresh your configuration table and wait for the configuration to be installed and compliant. Using kubectl, check that the service is running:

kubectl get svc -n ingress-nginx

kubectl get pods -n hello-arc

Open a web browser and navigate to your node IP, which is the external-IP of your ingress-nginx-controller:

Step 3: create Windows configuration (optional)

If you have a Windows node, you can also enable flux2 for Windows. The hello-arc-windows sample uses a hello-arc Windows container.

Tip

Windows containers are larger in size than Linux containers. The download of the hello-arc-windows container can take up to 15 minutes.

Create a new namespace-level configuration for Windows nodes.

Namespace-level configuration

Attribute	Input
Configuration name	config-helloarc-windows
Namespace	hello-arc
Scope	Namespace
Source kind	Git Repository
Repository URL	<URL of your fork>
Reference type	Branch
Branch	main
Repository type	Public
Sync interval	1
Sync timeout	10
Kustomization
Instance name	app
Path	./hello-arc-windows/releases/app
Sync interval	10
Sync timeout	10
Prune	Enabled
Force	Not enabled

Step 4: update your application using GitOps

1. In your fork of the azure-arc-jumpstart-apps repository, navigate to hello-arc > releases > app > hello-arc.yaml.

2. Make a change to this YAML file by selecting Edit. Change the replicaCount to 5. Change the value to "Deploying to AKS Edge Essentials Gitops!"

3. Commit this change.

   Note

   Because we set the sync interval to 1 min when creating the configuration, Flux pulls down changes from GitHub every minute.

   

4. Use kubectl to see the old pods terminate and new pods come online:

   kubectl get pods -n hello-arc -w
   

   

5. Refresh your application to see this change reflected as a rolling update:

   

For more information about GitOps, see the Azure Arc Jumpstart guide.

Next steps

• Overview
• Uninstall AKS cluster