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How modern DevOps is done. Part 1: containers and repositories

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Posted on 19.06.2023
Image by AI on ChatGPT (Dall-E)
Refill!

I am a fullstack developer, and yet my knowledge of DevOps is still kinda fragmented. So I've decided to kickstart a series of articles where I'll do research on how the deployment is done today, starting from having a bare web application running just locally, and ending up having it in the cloud, turned into a real cloud-native application.

I remember the good old days when DevOps was about setting up PM2 and observing the output in the console, sitting and having a beer. Well, these days are long gone, and now I am gonna spend real money on having everything containerised and renting an actual production-grade K8s cluster.

Why containers and not serverless? Well, in my opinion, serverless is an absolute go for startups where expenses matter. For the enterprises with stable income stability and availability play the first fiddle, so the only reasonable option for them is running everything in a containerised environment.

I am also choosing the Google Cloud provider, because I believe GCP became an industry standard a long time ago, it provides same functionality as AWS, yet being simpler in many ways, and also objectively cheaper.

The application

I start with a basic Go application and then build on-top of that. Here it is.

👉 📃  cmd/main.go
package main


import (
    "net/http"


    "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
)


func main() {
    r := gin.Default()


    r.GET("/", func(c *gin.Context) {
        c.JSON(http.StatusOK, gin.H{
            "hello": "there",
        })
    })


    r.GET("/ping", func(c *gin.Context) {
        c.JSON(http.StatusOK, gin.H{
            "message": "pong",
        })
    })


    r.Run()
}
The code is licensed under the MIT license

The aforementioned application is built using the Gin-Gonic framework, and serves two paths: GET / and GET /ping. That will be enough for now.

Docker

Among all solutions for containerization Docker bears absolute popularity, so I will be using it. To create a Docker image, a Dockerfile should be created.

Here, I used a so-called multi-stage Dockerfile. It is recommended to split docker files into stages for building and actual running, due to the efforts of making the production image more lightweight and easy to read.

👉 📃  Dockerfile
FROM golang:1.18-alpine as builder


WORKDIR /root


ARG GITHUB_USERNAME
ARG GITHUB_TOKEN


RUN apk add --no-cache --update git


RUN echo "machine github.com login ${GITHUB_USERNAME} password ${GITHUB_TOKEN}" > ~/.netrc
RUN echo "machine api.github.com login ${GITHUB_USERNAME} password ${GITHUB_TOKEN}" >> ~/.netrc


ENV GO111MODULE "on"


WORKDIR /build


COPY go.mod go.sum ./
RUN go mod download
COPY . /build
RUN GOOS=linux CGO_ENABLED=0 GOARCH=amd64 go build -o app ./cmd/main.go


FROM alpine:3.15.0 as base
COPY --from=builder /build/app /app


EXPOSE 8080


ENTRYPOINT ["/app"]
The code is licensed under the MIT license

I'll add two new commands to the Makefile to build and run the image. The image tag version is going to be "latest" for now.

👉 📃  Makefile
build_image:
    @docker build -t devops-app:latest .


run_image:
    @docker run -p 8080:8080 devops-app:latest
The code is licensed under the MIT license

After running the build command, to make sure that the image is really there, type:

$
docker images | grep devops-app
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Docker image repository

Docker has its own image repository called Dockerhub. They allow uploading one public image free of charge. However, as I am planning to host the app in the Google Cloud, it makes sense to push the image to GAR instead. So, the GAR acronym stands for "Google Artifact Registry". GCP had the Container Registry before, which is now declared as deprecated.

GAR has a free tier of 500 mb a month. My image is gonna weight about 20 mb, so I with a bit of luck I am not going to incur any expenses for storing my image there.

Creating a GCP project

So I made a new project in the Google Cloud Console, called devops-live. In practice, a company creates two projects: one for the live env, and the other - for staging and dev.

Setting up gcloud CLI tool

This tool is essential, it bears the same purpose as the aws CLI tool. Most importantly, it provides a way to authenticate and perform operations with the project.

Here is how the tool can be installed.

Authenticate with OAuth2 by running the login command, and select the project. Note that you need to use the ID of the project, not the name.

In my case, the project ID is: "go-app-390716".

$
gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project go-app-390716
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Setting up a repository in GAR

So I am going to need a registry of type "Docker". For the time being, I will create it manually, via the web console. In the next article I will make use of Terraform for creating resources.

👮 Never ever create resources manually, always use Terraform for this purpose.

Creating a Docker repository

So the name of the repository in my case is "devops", and the location I chose to be "asia-east1".

Pushing the image to the repository

The CLI tool must be configured as an authentication tool for Docker. The following command will add the repo to the "credHelpers" section of ~/.docker/config.json.

$
gcloud auth configure-docker asia-east1-docker.pkg.dev
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Before pushing the image, I build it:

$
make build_image
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Then I need to look for the image ID, using the following command:

$
docker images
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Assuming that the ID of the image is "f93d9aa86a39", I tag it using the following command:

$
docker tag f93d9aa86a39 asia-east1-docker.pkg.dev/go-app-390716/devops/devops-app:latest
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Where "devops-app" is the future name of the image in the repository, and the tag (version) is "latest".

The output of the docker images command should look like this: 

REPOSITORY                                                  TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED             SIZE
asia-east1-docker.pkg.dev/go-app-390716/devops/devops-app   latest    f93d9aa86a39   About an hour ago   16.3MB
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Okay, time to push the image:

$
docker push asia-east1-docker.pkg.dev/go-app-390716/devops/devops-app
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Aaaand... Bang! Here it is:

The image in GAR

To pull the latest tag (version) of that image back, use this command:

$
docker pull asia-east1-docker.pkg.dev/go-app-390716/devops/devops-app:latest
The code is licensed under the MIT license

Something did not work out as expected? Follow this article for more details.

And that's all for today.

We have uncovered the way to dockerize an application, and also how to push and pull that image to/from a repository.

In the upcoming series of articles I will uncover and explore the next steps on a journey of having the application deployed and properly observed.

The code for this part is here. Enjoy!


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Sergei Gannochenko

Business-oriented fullstack engineer, in ❤️ with Tech.
Golang, React, TypeScript, Docker, AWS, Jamstack.
15+ years in dev.