Banzai Pipeline, or simply Pipeline is a tabletop reef break located in Hawaii, Oahu's North Shore. The most famous and infamous reef in the universe is the benchmark by which all other waves are measured.
Pipeline enables developers to go from commit to scale in minutes by turning Kubernetes into a feature rich application platform integrating CI/CD, centralized logging, monitoring, enterprise-grade security, cost management and autoscaling.
- Pipeline
- Architecture overview
- Installation
- API specification
- Dependency management
- Create Kubernetes clusters
- Deploy applications
- Security
- Monitoring
- Centralized logging
- Operators
- Quick howto
- Reporting bugs
- Contributing
- License
Pipeline is a feature rich application platform, built for containers on top of Kubernetes to automate the DevOps experience, continuous application development and the lifecycle of deployments. Pipeline enables developers to go from commit to scale in minutes by turning Kubernetes into a feature rich application platform integrating CI/CD, centralized logging, monitoring, enterprise-grade security and autoscaling.
The main features of the platform are:
- Provisioning: Provision highly available Kubernetes clusters on any of the supported cloud providers, on-premise or hybrid configurations
- Application focused: Focus on building great applications and leave the hard stuff of ops, failover, build pipelines, patching and security to Banzai Pipeline
- Scaling: Supports SLA rules for resiliency, failover and autoscaling
- Observability: Centralized log collection, tracing and advanced monitoring support for the infrastructure, Kubernetes cluster and the deployed applications
- Hook in: Go from commit to scale in minutes using our container-native CI/CD workflow engine
- Spotguides: Use your favorite development framework and let Pipeline automate the rest
Check out the developer beta if you would like to try out the platform:
Banzai Cloud supports Kubernetes and the container based application platform - Pipeline - on all major providers in a way that makes portability between vendors as easy as possible, seamless and automated.
The list of currently supported providers are:
- Alibaba ACK
- Amazon EKS
- Google GKE
- Microsoft AKS
- Oracle OKE
Pipeline does support BYOC - Bring Your Own Cluster and can adopt and manage existing Kubernetes clusters as well.
There is work undergoing for the following providers:
- Digital Ocean DOK
Pipeline enforces a typical cloud native architecture which takes full advantage of on-demand delivery, global deployment, elasticity, and higher-level services. It enables huge improvements in developer productivity, business agility, scalability, availability, utilization, and cost savings.
It is written in Golang and built on public cloud provider APIs, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana, Docker, Vault and a few other open source technologies from the CNCF landscape - however all of these are abstracted for the end user behind a secure REST API, UI or CLI.
The Pipeline Control Plane is the central location where all the components of the Pipeline Platform are assembled together and it runs all the provided services as CI/CD, authentication, log collection, monitoring, dashboards, application registries, spotguide definitions, security scans and more. The control plane itself is a Kubernetes deployment as well, and it's cloud agnostic - currently there are out of the box deployments for AWS, Azure, Google and for Minikube (for local/dev purpose).
A default control plane deployment looks like this:
To launch a Pipeline control plane on one of the supported provider please follow this documentation.
A typical cluster/application deployed with Pipeline - as an example using Spark/Zeppelin spotguide deployment - looks like this.
In order to try the API follow this installation guide.
Vendoring all dependencies is essential to have a go get-able package. Please follow our dependency management guideline for more details.
Pipeline API is described using the OpenAPI 3.0 specification (formerly Swagger). The get the specification please follow this link.
Based on our OpenAPI 3.0 descriptor we have generated language clients for different languages:
Kubernetes clusters can be created explicitly (directly triggered by calling the API), part of our CI/CD flow (where the cluster is created on demand as part of the flow) or deployments.
The easiest way to create a Kubernetes cluster on one of the supported cloud providers is by using the REST API, available as a Postman collection. Clusters can be created, updated or deleted.
Pipeline has an in-built CI/CD system. Once the GitHub repository is configured with a commit hook, Pipeline can automatically clone, build and deploy the applications. The target Kubernetes clusters are created (or reused) on demand as part of the CI/CD flow. For a CI/CD example please follow this CI/CD guide. The CI/CD flow does static code analysis and image security scans as well.
For alternative ways to create a cluster please follow the create cluster guide.
Once Pipeline is started, it can deploy applications using a RESTful API from any Helm repository or using the in-built CI/CD engine.
We have introduced a new feature where beside the Helm CLI and gRPC a RESTful API can be used to deploy applications packaged with Helm.
The easiest way to deploy applications to it is through the following Postman examples.
For further CI/CD example please follow this CI/CD guide.
For alternative ways to learn about application deployments please follow the deployments guide.
For Authentication Pipeline uses OAuth2 via delegating user authentication to the service that hosts the user account. There are plenty of OAuth2 identity providers out there: GitHub, Google, Facebook, Azure Active Directory, Twitter and Salesforce to mention only the biggest ones. At this time in Pipeline there is support for GitHub, mainly due to the fact that our CI/CD component is triggered by GitHub events, but we are using the very flexible QOR package which supports many major providers as a plugin mechanism, so it is just a matter of a configuration change to have support for the providers above (beside oldschool username/passwords). The main benefit of this solution is that we don't have to store any user credentials and our users can use their existing accounts at these sites to access our service. The OAuth2 flow is highlighted in this diagram. When a user hits Pipeline, they have to first login with GitHub to have a user record created in the RDBMS - the REST endpoint for that is: https://$HOST/auth/login.
JWT token is a really good candidate for being a Bearer token. Note that JWT is based on the RFC 7519 standard. The main benefit of JWT is that is self-contained, so it allows stateless authentication. The server's protected routes will check for a valid JWT in the Authorization header and if it's present the user will be allowed to access protected resources based on the scopes field of the token. JWT is stateless unless you would like to allow users to revoke the generated tokens immediately (so not waiting until the token expires). To be able to revoke JWT tokens you have to maintain a blacklist or a whitelist where you store all revoked or valid tokens.
For the purpose of storing tokens we choose HashiCorp's Vault. However there was another major contributor to the decision to standardize on Vault: Vault’s nice integration with the Kubernetes Authentication API. After Vault is started, the Kubernetes auth backend has to be enabled and configured, and with that Vault can lease tokens to be able to use its API based on ServiceAccount JWT tokens. This enables other applications running in the same Kubernetes cluster to call Vault and with this we can use tightly scoped tokens with various TTLs.
Vault does support dynamic secrets thus decided to add support and make the out of the box solution for all our supported deployments. To harden security each application gets a dedicated credential towards the requested service, this credential only belongs to the requesting application and has a fixed expiry time. Because the credential is dedicated it is possible to track down which application accessed the service and when and it is easy to revoke it because they are managed at a central place, Vault. Since Pipeline is running on Kubernetes we can apply Kubernetes Service Account based authentication to get the Vault tokens first which we can later exchange for a credential (username/password) based on our configured Vault role. Please see this diagram for further details about the sequence of events:
As you can see with this solution Pipeline became able to connect to (e.g.) MySQL simply because it is running in the configured Kubernetes Service Account and without being required to type a single username/password during the configuration of the application.
The code implementing the dynamic secret allocation for database connections and Vault configuration described above can be found in our open sourced project Bank-Vaults.
Pipeline by default monitors the infrastructure, Kubernetes cluster and the applications deployed. We use Prometheus and we deploy federated Prometheus clusters (using TLS) to securely monitor the infrastructure. We deploy default Grafana dashboards and alerts based on the cluster layout and applications provisioned. For further information about monitoring please follow up these posts.
We are using fluentd and fluent-bit to move application logs towards a centralized location. To collect all logs we deploy fluent-bit as a DaemonSet. These pods will mount the Docker container logs from the Host machine and transfer to the Fluentd service for further transformations. For further information about log collection please follow up these posts.
Pipeline installs and runs Kubernetes operators to bring human operational knowledge into code. There are (cloud agnostic) operators supporting deployments, storage management, autoscaling and more.
To get a Banzai Cloud Control Plane instance up and running quickly follow these installation steps.
In case you have problems please open an issue on GitHub.
Thanks you for your contribution and being part of our community. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on the code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests. When you are opening a PR to Pipeline the first time we will require you to sign a standard CLA.
Copyright (c) 2017-2019 Banzai Cloud, Inc.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.