Educates Workshop GitOps Configurer

The Educates Workshop GitOps Configurer project includes a set of tools to enable an "Educates Operator's" provisioning of workshops and associated training portals via a GitOps approach, and only expose the minimum necessary configuration for the operator.

The Educates Operator can configure environments to host a set of workshops and training portals that are sourced by one or more Educates clusters.

Workshops are organized around the concept of "workshop bundle", where the bundles is a packages set of workshop definitions. Workshop bundles are typically authored and managed from the same Github repositories, but do not necessarily need to be.

Workshop bundles are packaged as OCI container images that are sourced via a GitOps reconciler, along with associated training portal configuration from the workshop configuration github repository.

The project leverages Carvel tooling to accomplish two concerns:

GitOps reconcilation - use the Kapp controller to monitor for specific OCI and Github artifacts and versions
Simplified configuration through overlays - the educates operator is not concerned with specifics of authoring either workshop definitions or training portal configuration. The operator only needs to be concerned with operational configuration. Carvel ytt is used to manage overlay templates to take simplified operator configuration and configure training portal resources under the hood.

Educates Operator concerns

Configure a new workshop configuration repository

new github repo
create credentials for access
create environments directory at root

Configure a new environment configuration

create a new directory with appropriate name for environment under environments directory.
following Configure sections outline how to add common training portal and workshop bundle configurations

Configure workshop bundle versions (this may be elevated above educates operator to prod)

Add the following to versions.yaml

General:

mode (This can be one of one_app or app_per_bundle)
reconcilation interval (default 3min)
overlays version (aligns to educates minor version?)

Workshop bundle:

names
package coordinates
versions/references
pkg credentials to access

Configure training portal common configuration

Add following to common.yaml file to configure:

themes
ancestors
sessions configuration
registration
credentials

Configure workshop session characteristics

for each training portal

training portal name
workshop names associated with workshop bundle(s)
defaults, or configurations by specific workshop:
- capacity
- initial
- reserved
- expires
- overtime
- deadline
- orphaned
- overdue
- refresh

Platform Operator concerns

Deploy workshop configuration as gitops in an Educates Cluster

If manually deploying to an educates cluster, do following steps:

Ensure you have an educates cluster, and KUBECONFIG set to point to its config
Create your version of the configuration files in your GitHub gitops repo.
Create the required RBAC and Gitops App definition and deploy it into your cluster.

Verify the application and workshop configuration has reconciled:

via kapp:

kapp list -n <package-installs>

you should see similar to follows:

Name                  Namespaces                                                      Lcs   Lca
workshops-gitops.app  (cluster),                                                      true  22s
                    workshops-course-spring-academy-sample,workshops-spring-guides

Lcs: Last Change Successful
Lca: Last Change Age

This shows a coarse grain status of all the gitops configuration from your workshop configuration repo. Any failures across any workshop bundles will show a failure here.

via kubectl:

kubectl --kubeconfig ${KUBECONFIG} get apps.kappctrl.k14s.io -a

you should see similar to follows:

NAMESPACE                                NAME                                     DESCRIPTION           SINCE-DEPLOY   AGE
educates-package                         educates-cluster-essentials              Reconcile succeeded   27m            27m
educates-package                         educates-training-platform               Reconcile succeeded   25m            27m
package-installs                         workshops-gitops                         Reconcile succeeded   103s           4m56s
workshops-course-spring-academy-sample   workshops-course-spring-academy-sample   Reconcile succeeded   101s           4m54s
workshops-spring-guides                  workshops-spring-guides                  Reconcile succeeded   101s           4m54s

Notice listing apps across all namespaces allows you to see the state of the individual workshop bundle app deployments. You can use this to troubleshoot specific bundle failures.

Remove workshop gitops configuration

Remove the gitops app and RBAC from the cluster.

It will remove the carvel application and dependent config and security config.