This is a CI/CD pipeline using CircleCI that automatically deploy ASP.NET Core Application to EKS Cluster.

The project's goal is to apply the skills and knowledge that I developed throughout the Cloud DevOps Nanodegree program. In this project I did:

• Working in AWS
• Using CircleCI to implement Continuos Integration and Continuos Deployment
• Building pipelines
• Working with Ansible and CloudFormation to deploy clusters
• Building Kubernetes clusters
• Building Docker containers in pipelines

1. Create the CircleCI account
2. Create a Github repository
3. Set up a Dockerhub account and repository
4. Create an AWS - IAM user with the policies suggested on the official eksctl website as Minimum IAM policies

I used source code from my other interesting course Architecting ASP.NET Core 3 Applications: Best Practices. This app is building a ticket management system for events. The backend uses the ASP.NET Core Restful API, and the frontend uses Blazor WebAssembly.

I used AWS Cloudformation to deploy the Kubernetes Cluster. I have researched and customized based on these templates and documents:

• amazon-eks-fully-private-vpc.yaml
• amazon-eks-nodegroup.yaml
• AWS EKS: Managed setup with CloudFormation

I decided to split it into 4 cloudformation stacks:

• Network, create network infrastructure that the the EKS cluster will reside in.
• EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) for deploying a Kubernetes cluster.
• NodeGroup is used to create actual worker nodes. For greater security, these nodes are linked to private subnets.
• Management is needed to configure and manage the EKS Cluster and its deployments and services. These EC2 instances are connected to public subnets. Also used to connect and troubleshoot issues that happen in worker nodes (private subnets).

After deploying the infrastructure, I used Ansible to configure management hosts.

1. Install AWS CLI and Kubectl.

2. Run aws eks update-kubeconfig --region <<region-code>> --name <<cluster name>> to fetch kubectl config

3. Run kubectl apply -f <<path to defined resource template.yaml>> to create Kubernetes resouces

4. Run kubectl set image deployments/<<deployment name>> <<container name>>=<<docker image>> to apply new docker image for deployment

5. Run kubectl rollout status deployments/<<deployment name>> to check deployment status

6. Run kubectl get svc <<name of service>> to view information of service

I have used CircleCI to define pipelines including:

• Linting
• Code building
• Unit testing
• Integration testing
• Build and push docker image to Docker Hub
• Slack notify when pipeline failed, deployment success

After the EKS-Cluster has been successfully configured using Ansible within the CI/CD Pipeline, I checked the deployment and service as follows:

$ kubectl get deploy,svc,pods
NAME                                                   READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/capstone-project-backend-deployment    2/2     2            2           31h
deployment.apps/capstone-project-frontend-deployment   2/2     2            2           31h

NAME                                        TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP                                                               PORT(S)        AGE
service/capstone-project-backend-service    LoadBalancer   10.100.50.170   ad202d75462044bcc92cfafc1cfef81b-2093070563.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com   80:30734/TCP   31h
service/capstone-project-frontend-service   LoadBalancer   10.100.97.87    a6cd963bdc9c14fa282301cc33b22f8e-1955870495.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com   80:30862/TCP   31h
service/kubernetes                          ClusterIP      10.100.0.1      <none>                                                                    443/TCP        31h

NAME                                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/capstone-project-backend-deployment-5d7f8cc6f4-d2wjq   1/1     Running   0          6m44s
pod/capstone-project-backend-deployment-5d7f8cc6f4-sbns5   1/1     Running   0          6m48s
pod/capstone-project-frontend-deployment-d895f5db8-fvp7d   1/1     Running   0          6m38s
pod/capstone-project-frontend-deployment-d895f5db8-qlpbw   1/1     Running   0          6m9s

Public Loader Balancer's DNS: http://ad202d75462044bcc92cfafc1cfef81b-2093070563.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/swagger/index.html