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GitOps for Rancher

The first design is highly customizable but requires project-specific configuration for each application. It makes the IDE and Git UI the center of the Application Developer's experience. Build and deployment automation is managed by Platform Engineers.

All container images / OCI artifacts can be stored centrally by the organization in SUSE Private Registry, with base images and supporting applications coming from SUSE Registry and SUSE Application Collection.

Choose and Mirror Trusted Images​

This design is intended to enable secure-by-default pipelines for customers. To keep the supply chain secure, the plaform admin takes on the responsibility of ensuring that all OCI artifacts used by the development teams are centralized in a registry their organization can control and audit. In this case, base container images and packaged applications in development are sourced from SUSE Application Collection or the SUSE Registry.

App Project Setup​

Developers or project leads will set up software projects in Git using the flow methodology they prefer and the features available in their git UI of choice (GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, etc.).

Adding Development Containers configuration in the project repo means that developers can have a self-contained development environment running in a pre-configured container, right from their IDE.

Rancher Desktop can provide the local Docker (Moby) container runtime on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Rancher Desktop will also provide a local Kubernetes (K3s) environment for:

  • running local data service instances using Helm charts or OCI images provided by SUSE Application Collection, fetched from the organization's private registry.
  • testing Helm charts for the ultimate deployment of the app to Kubernetes

Git* Actions​

Developers will be able to build and test their code in their locally using Dev Containers in Rancher Desktop, but ultimately they will be packaged and deployed to Kubernetes.

Most git UIs offer some version of GitHub Actions functionality. Gitea uses a fork of the act runner.

Creating custom actions for building and deployment responsibility on either the Developer or Platform Engineer, but templates are available for many application frameworks, and the format allows for extensive customization. This approach requires more work up front than a Platform-as-a-Service approach using off-the-shelf buildpacks, but allows more flexibility and gives more visibility into the build process.

Full GitApps Sequence​

With the preparatory work done, a Developer should be able to start coding in a project almost immediately after cloning the repository, using an IDE that supports development containers or a coding environment embedded in the platform itself (e.g. Coder).

Elements of this design can be substituted for extenral services as needed (e.g. GitHub.com for a local git environment), but everything in the flow can be run on SUSE Rancher Prime. This allows an organization to centralize control over the entire code-to-cloud journey and track the entire software supply chain.

Security Monitoring​

Container and network security monitoring for the platform is provided by by SUSE Security. Documentation on integrating this with GitOps for Rancher coming soon.

Observability​

Container observability and application debugging capabilities are provided by SUSE Observability. Documentation on integrating this with GitOps for Rancher coming soon.