03_Introducing_quality_gates

Introducing quality gates

Since you have already set up your cluster to be monitored by Dynatrace, Keptn can use its information to evaluate performance tests and to decide wether an artifact should be promoted, based on quality gates. Quality gates allow you to define limits for certain metrics (such as the response time of a service) that must not be exceeded by a service. If these criteria are met, an artifact will be allowed to proceed to the nest stage, otherwise the deployment will be rolled back automatically.

You can specify quality gates in a file called perfspec/perfspec.json within the code repository of the respective service (carts in our case). After forking the carts repository into your organization, the perfspec directory within that repository contains two files:

• perfspec_dynatrace.json
• perfspec_prometheus.json

In this workshop, we will be using Dynatrace to retrieve metrics. Thus, to enable the Dynatrace quality gates, please rename perfspec_dynatrace.json to perfspec.json in your carts repository using the GitHub UI.

1. In your own GitHub organization, go to the forked carts repository:

   https://github.com/your-github-org/carts

2. There you find the folder perfspec. Go into this folder and click on perfspec_dynatrace.json.

3. Then click on the Edit this file button as shown below:

   Edit this file

   

4. (1) Rename the file from perfspec_dynatrace.json to perfspec.json and (2) click on the green Commit changes button.

   Renaming file and commit changes

   

Now, you have successfully activated the quality gate and your carts service will only be promoted into production if it adheres to the quality gates (response time < 1s) specified in the perfspec.json file.

Deployment of a slow implementation of the carts service

To demonstrate the benefits of having quality gates, we will now deploy a version of the carts service (version 0.8.2) with a terribly slow response time. To trigger the deployment of this version, please execute the following command in your docker container:

keptn send event new-artifact --project=sockshop --service=carts --image=docker.io/keptnexamples/carts --tag=0.8.2

After some time, this new version will be deployed into the dev stage. If you look into the shipyard.yaml file that you used to create the sockshop project, you will see that in this stage, only functional tests are executed. This means that even though version has a slow response time, it will be promoted into the staging environment, because it is working as expected on a functional level. You can verify the deployment of the new version into staging by navigating to the URL of the service in your browser using the following URL:

echo http://carts.sockshop-staging.$(kubectl get cm keptn-domain -n keptn -o=jsonpath='{.data.app_domain}')

On the info homepage of the service, the Version should now be set to v2, and the Delay in ms value should be set to 1000. (Note that it can take a few minutes until this version is deployed after sending the new-artifact event.)

As soon as this version has been deployed into the staging environment, the jmeter-service will execute the performance tests for this service. When those are finished, the pitometer-service will evaluate them using Dynatrace as a data source. At this point, it will detect that the response time of the service is too high and mark the evaluation of the performance tests as failed.

As a result, the new artifact will not be promoted into the production stage. Additionally, the traffic routing within the staging stage will be automatically updated in order to send requests to the previous version of the service. You can again verify that by navigating to the service homepage and inspecting the Version property. This should now be set to v1 again.

Deployment of a carts version without the slowdown

To demonstrate that the quality gate opens and allows promoting a version into production, which adheres to the quality objectives, we will now deploy a new version of the carts service (version 0.8.3). This version has fixed the slowdown.

keptn send event new-artifact --project=sockshop --service=carts --image=docker.io/keptnexamples/carts --tag=0.8.3

As a result, the new artifact will be promoted into the production stage. Please follow the logs in the Keptn's bridge to verify that:

Keptn's bridge with carts 0.8.3

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