IBM Bluemix Zero-downtime deployment capability for cloud applications

3
votes

We have a NodeJS Cloud Foundry application with a DevOps Delivery Pipeline enabled.

enter image description here Initially we set up the pipeline to use the Active Deploy extension to the Delivery Pipeline in Bluemix to deploy app updates without any downtime. Also called: Rolling deployments, Blue-Green deployments, Red-Black deployments. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-bluemix-rollingpipeline/cl-bluemix-rollingpipeline-pdf.pdf

Unfortunately, the Active Deploy service was retired swiftly as of June 23, 2017 as we are inhabiting downtime upon deployment. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/05/retirement-ibm-active-deploy-beta-service/

How do we go back to the process by which a new version of an application is deployed into an environment with no disruption in service for the consumer? UrbanCode? Other options?

1
ibm-clouddevopscontinuous-deployment

1 Answers

2
votes

A good way of doing this is to use the IBM Cloud Garage's blue-green-deploy cf plugin. In your deploy script, add:

cf add-plugin-repo CF-Community https://plugins.cloudfoundry.org
cf install-plugin blue-green-deploy -f -r CF-Community

Then, instead of doing cf push <app_name>, do: 

cf blue-green-deploy <app_name>

You can also specify a manifest, or specify a smoke test (if the smoke test fails, the build will be marked as failed and the original version will continue running).