How we used RSong to build RChain's new Web infrastructure

Introduction

I was recently tasked with the migration of the following RChain websites:

• developer.rchain.coop, node-js apps with [postgres] backend
• blog.rchain.coop a multi-home wordpress blog
• www.rchain.coop
• rsong.rchain.coop

This migration also included building a new infrastructure for hosting the sites. The ideal solution must satisfy the non-functional requirements:

• Scalable: scale up/down to meet demands
• Self-healing system that can determine which service is healthy and which is not (and apply auto-healing)
• Extendable: easily extend the architecture for additional websites/web apps
• Provide tractability and audibility of the sites
• Reversion: Revert back to any previously known stable state
• Hot-deploy: Rapid deployment without downtime
• Secure connection: ssl/tls certificates

Luckily, we had a solution in rsong-proxy and rsong-acquisition
that met all above non-functional requirements. RSong IaC provides:

• CI/CD pipeline
• Kubernetes, k8, clustering
• helm charts to streamlines installing and managing Kubernetes applications.
• ssl/tls certificates by utilizing k8 ingress and letsencrypt

And so we began our migration journey and creating the workflow for managing RChain web content.

The Pipeline

To take full advantage of the RSong deployment infrastructure, we first had to dockerize the RChain web content. We used a simple Gulp script to generate project structure from existing assets. The docker files build the corresponding projects and expose the http port upon successful babel transpilation. The final step involved applying RSong helm charts to provision and deploy the applications. google cloud-build and google-container registry took care of the rest.

Step 1: git
The first step was to create a www git repo. Next, we configured git branch policies to enforce code quality and change management standards.

Step 2: provisioning
The second step was to re-use RSong helm charts to provision the required kubernetes, k8, infrastructure. This step entails installing:

• ingress controller to:
  • manages external access to the services in a cluster
  • fan out
    • route traffic from a single IP address to all services
    • mange TLS certs
  • load balancing
• TLS certificate
  • issuer, to issuer certs
  • manager, to manage certs lifecycle

Step 3 CI/CD
We used google cloud build for this step. Cloud-build jobs are triggered when git repo www master branch is changed. The pipelines:

• create docker image for each site
• publish docker images to google cloud container registry
• deploy using Rsong helm charts

Reflection

Using RSong IaC and RSong helm templates provided a fast and simple road map for managing RChain application lifecycles.