cf-deployment

Table of Contents

• Purpose
• TLS validation
• Deploying CF
• Release Versioning
• Contributing
• Setup and Prerequisites
• Ops Files
• CI
• Migrating from Vars-Store to CredHub
• Migrating from cf-release to cf-deployment

Purpose

This repo contains a canonical BOSH deployment manifest for deploying the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime by relying individual component releases. It uses several newer features of the BOSH director and CLI. Older directors may need to be upgraded and have their configurations extended in order to support cf-deployment.

cf-deployment embodies several opinions about the CF Application Runtime. It:

• prioritizes readability and meaning to a human operator. For instance, only necessary configuration is included.
• emphasizes security by default.
  • CredHub is used to generate strong passwords, certs, and keys. There are no default credentials, even in bosh-lite.
  • TLS/SSL features are enabled on every job which supports TLS.
• uses two AZs to provide redundancy for most instance groups.
• uses Diego (source code) by default.
• deploys jobs to handle platform data persistence using singleton versions of the PXC release for databases and the CAPI release's singleton WebDAV job for blob storage. See the database and blobstore sections of the deployment guide for more information.
• assumes load-balancing will be handled by the IaaS or an external deployment.

TLS validation

Many test, development, and "getting started" environments do not have valid TLS certificates installed in their load balancers. For ease of use in such environments, cf-deployment skips TLS validation on some components that access each other via the "front door" of the Cloud Foundry load balancer.

Deployers who have valid or otherwise trusted load balancer certificates should use the stop-skipping-tls-validation.yml opsfile to force the validation of TLS certificates for all components.

Deploying CF

Deployment instructions are verbose so we've moved them into a dedicated deployment guide here.

Release Versioning

The Semantic Versioning scheme has been adopted by cf-deployment. A detailed description of how Semantic Versioning is applied to CF-Deployment can be found here.

Contributing to CF-Deployment

Although the default branch for the repository is main, we ask that all pull requests be made against the develop branch.

• Please fill out the PR Template when submitting pull requests. The information requested in the PR form provides important context for the team responsible for evaluating your submission.
• Please also take a look at the "style guide", which lays out some guidelines for adding properties or jobs to the deployment manifest.

Before submitting a pull request or pushing to the develop branch of cf-deployment, please:

1. run ./units/test which interpolates all of our ops files with the bosh cli.
   • By default, the test suite omits semantic tests, which require both jq and yq installed.
   • If you wish to run them, please install these requirements and set RUN_SEMANTIC=true in your environment.
   • Note: it is necessary to run the tests from the root of the repo.
2. confirm your changes can be successfully deployed with the latest release of cf-deployment and tested with the latest version of CAT's.
3. If modifying backup and restore, run ./scripts/test which runs a legacy bash suite for backup and restore ops. If you're adding an Ops-file, you will need to:
4. document it in its corresponding README.
5. add it to the ops file tests in units/test.

If you're promoting or deprecating Ops-file, please follow Ops-file workflows

Setup and Prerequisites

cf-deployment requires a bosh director with a valid cloud-config that has been configured with a certificate authority. It also requires the bosh CLI, which it relies on to generate and fill-in needed variables.

BOSH director and stemcells

cf-deployment requires both BOSH and Linux stemcells.

BOSH CLI

cf-deployment requires the BOSH CLI.

BOSH cloud-config

cf-deployment assumes that you've uploaded a compatible cloud-config to the BOSH director prior to deploying your foundation.

The cloud-config produced by bbl covers GCP, AWS, and Azure, and is compatible by default.

The iaas-support directory includes tools and templates for building cloud-configs for other IaaSes, including bosh-lite, vSphere, Openstack, and Alibaba Cloud.

For other IaaSes, you may need to do some engineering work to figure out the right cloud config (and possibly ops files) to get it working for cf-deployment.

BOSH runtime-config

cf-deployment requires that you have uploaded a runtime-config for BOSH DNS prior to deploying your foundation. We recommended that you use the one provided by the bosh-deployment repo:

bosh update-runtime-config bosh-deployment/runtime-configs/dns.yml --name dns

Note: BBL v6.10.0 or later will set a runtime config including BOSH DNS when you bbl up.

Deployment variables and CredHub

cf-deployment.yml requires additional information to provide environment-specific or sensitive configuration such as the system domain and various credentials.

To do this in the default configuration, we use CredHub, which is deployed on your BOSH director by default if you are using bbl.

Where necessary credential values are not present, CredHub will generate new values based on the type information stored in cf-deployment.yml.

Note: Since cf-deployment v3.0, CredHub has replaced the now deprecated BOSH vars-store as the default way to store and generate credentials.

Necessary variables that BOSH can't ask CredHub to generate need to be supplied as well.

If the deployment includes only the base manifest (cf-deployment.yml), this is just the system domain. However, some ops files introduce additional variables. See the README summary for the particular ops files you're using for any additional necessary variables.

There are three ways to supply such additional variables:

1. They can be provided by passing individual -v arguments. The syntax for -v arguments is -v <variable-name>=<variable-value>. This is the recommended method for supplying the system domain.
2. They can be provided in a yaml file accessed from the command line with the -l or --vars-file flag. This is the recommended method for configuring external persistence services.
3. They can be stored in CredHub directly with the CredHub CLI. If you do this, then you need follow variable namespacing rules respected by BOSH described here.

Ops Files

The configuration of CF represented by cf-deployment.yml is a workable, secure, fully-featured default. When the need arises to make different configuration choices for your foundation, you can accomplish this with the -o/--ops-file flags. These flags read a single .yml file that details operations to be performed on the manifest before variables are generated and filled. We've supplied some common manifest modifications in the operations directory. More details can be found in the Ops-file README.

The operations subdirectories

Addons

These ops-files make changes to most or all instance groups. They can be applied to the BOSH Director's runtime config, or directly to an individual deployment manifest.

The ops-file to configure platform component logging with rsyslog is such an add-on. Please see the Addon Ops-file README for details.

Community

"Community" ops-files are contributed by the Cloud Foundry community. They are not maintained or supported by the Release Integration team. For details, see the Community Ops-file README

Experimental

"Experimental" ops-files represent configurations that are in the process of being developed and/or validated. Once the configurations have been sufficiently validated, they will become part of cf-deployment.yml and the ops-files will be removed. For details, see the Experimental Ops-file README.

Test

"Test" ops-files are configurations that we run in our testing pipeline to enable certain features. We include them in the public repository (rather than in our private CI repositories) for a few reasons, depending on the particular ops-file.

Some files are included because we suspect that the configurations will be commonly needed but not easily generalized. For example, add-persistent-isolation-segment.yml shows how a deployer can add an isolated Diego cell, but the ops-file is hard to apply repeatably. In this case, the ops-file is an example.

Backup and Restore

Contains all the ops files utilized to enable and configure BOSH Backup and Restore (BBR). BBR is a CLI utility for orchestrating the backup and restore of BOSH deployments and BOSH directors. It orchestrates triggering the backup or restore process on the deployment or director, and transfers the backup artifact to and from the deployment or director.

CI

The ci for cf-deployment automatically bumps to the latest versions of its component releases on the develop branch. These bumps, along with any other changes made to develop, are deployed to a single long-running environment and tested with CATs before being merged to main if CATs goes green.

Each version of cf-deployment is given a corresponding branch in the CATs repo, so that users can discover which version of CATs to run against their deployments. For example, if you've deployed cf-deployment v6.10.0, check out the cf6.10 branch in cf-acceptance-tests to run CATs.

The configuration for our pipeline can be found here.

Migrating from Vars Store to CredHub

CredHub is default as of cf-deployment release v If you've got a long running foundation running a release of cf-deployment that relies on vars-store and want to upgrade to a version that's backed by CredHub, you will need to migrate your credentials from vars-store to CredHub. We have a utility to help you migrate.

Can I Transition from cf-release?

CF-Deployment replaces the [manifest generation scripts in cf-release][cf-release-url] which have been deprecated and are no longer supported by the Release Integration team. Although the team is no longer working on or supporting migrations from cf-release to cf-deployment, you can still find the tooling and documentation in the cf-deployment-transition repo.