Metaphor

metaphor is an example containerized nodejs application that serves numerous purposes on the pro platform.

Best Practices

metaphor provides a demonstration space for application best practices in a tangible way that's easy to apply to other projects. When engineers discover good patterns and wish have those patterns adopted in other projects, add that new idea in the most straightforward way possible to the metaphor app as well. By doing so our engineering team can fully engage with the best application approaches.

CI/CD

metaphor has a complete ci/cd process with automated builds, container creation, container publishing, linting, tests, deployment to preprod and production, release management, version management, and hotfixes. It serves as an excellent proving ground for changes to the ci/cd layer.

When a new version of our CI is needed, it's best to adopt that new version of the CI in metaphor first. Run through the adjustments to your automation and test it through all of your environments and kubernetes clusters without impacting the applications that your engineers and users depend on.

Kubernetes Representations

metaphor is a multi-instance load balanced nodejs app. It's deployed to the development and staging namespaces in the preprod cluster, and the production namespace in the production cluster.

The kubernetes manifests produced by the metaphor CI include a working example of a kubernetes deployment with downstream replicaset and pods, a service account with a security context used, a service to make the application available to the cluster, and an ingress to make the service available outside the cluster.

Ingress Integrations

The ingress manifest demonstrates integration with our automated approach to dns management, load balancer management, and TLS/SSL certificate creation and renewal.

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    # Change the next line to "letsencrypt-staging" while testing adjustments, change to "letsencrypt-prod" after confirming LE certificate was issued
    cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: "letsencrypt-prod"
  name: metaphor
  labels:
    run: metaphor
spec:
  rules:
    - host: metaphor-development.yourdomain.com
      http:
        paths:
          - backend:
              serviceName: metaphor
              servicePort: 3000
            path: /
  tls:
    - secretName: metaphor-tls
      hosts:
        - metaphor-development.yourdomain.com

Some cool automated things to note: - the value specified in spec.rules.host will automatically create a route53 cname that's bound to the ingress' elastic load balancer - the cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer annotation will prompt cert-manager to automatically create a certificate for your application, and will store that cert in the secretName specified - nginx will automatically route traffic to the metaphor service based on the path-based/host-based routing specified in spec.rules

Environment Configs and Secrets

metaphor also includes a working example of how to leverage a multi-environment secrets management paradigm powered by vault and external-secrets.

There's also a configmap implementation to demonstrate how to leverage non-sensitive configuration values.

Datadog Integrations

metaphor is set up to provide cloud and container observability and monitoring best practices with datadog. It demonstrates using datadog for metaphor's application logs, container statistics, application metrics, appliction performance monitoring, dashboarding, and alerting.

Secrets Management

metaphor leverages hashicorp vault for secrets management. vault runs in the mgmt cluster and metaphor runs in preprod and production, so it serves as an example for secrets management. To read more see our vault page