1. Building a Cloud Native Platform
to Provide Lab Instances at
CloudBees University
Our journey, choices, tech, practices...
Romén Rodríguez-Gil, CloudBees
Joost van der Griendt, CloudBees

2. About us
Romén Rodríguez-Gil & Joost van der Griendt

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Romén (@romenrg)
Software engineering, leading startups, building digital products, lecturing,...

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Joost (@joost_vdg)
Consultant, Software Engineer, OpenSource Contributor

5. Building a Cloud Native Platform
to Provide Lab Instances at
CloudBees University
Our journey, choices, tech, practices...
Romén Rodríguez-Gil, CloudBees
Joost van der Griendt, CloudBees

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Index
• What is CloudBees University
– What we offer
– Content and labs
– Our previous lab infrastructure
• Our new cloud-native platform
– Goals and use-cases
– Tech, concepts, and practices applied
• Demo
– Creating instances via UI
• Technical details
– What is happening behind the scenes
– Architecture and components
• Key gains
• Future

7. What is CloudBees University
What we offer
Content and labs ; previous lab infrastructure

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What is CloudBees University
cloudbees.com/cloudbees-university

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What is CloudBees University
CloudBees University Community

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• Self-paced training
– Jenkins, DevOps, ARO, SDM,...
– Multiple levels (fundamentals, intermediate, shorter modules,...)
• Labs
– Hands-on, with pre-configured tools:
• Jenkins (& agents)
• Gitea
• LDAP
• Web terminal
• Jenkins & CloudBees Certifications
What is CloudBees University
What we offer

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What is CloudBees University
Content

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What is CloudBees University
Labs (1)

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What is CloudBees University
Labs (2)

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What is CloudBees University
Our previous lab infrastructure (1)
Infrastructure as-code but
human-operated; & focused
on instructor-led
slides.html
VM.zip
CloudDelivery
SlidesandVMs

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• It has become stale
– Built in 2016, its technology is outdated in today’s world
– Difficult to maintain & enhance
– Highly coupled to AWS
– Maintaining two delivery methods (portable VMs + cloud)
• Cannot fulfill all our current needs
– Not build for self-service
– Not manageable by others (e.g. via UI)
– Not Kubernetes ready
What is CloudBees University
Our previous lab infrastructure (2)

16. Our new cloud-native platform
Goals and use-cases
Tech, concepts, and practices applied

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• Goals
– Kubernetes-ready (e.g. support CBs CI modern)
– Apply today’s practices
– Self-service
– Switch to GCP & < Total Cost of Ownership
• Use cases
– Support existing labs & K8s-based courses (and products)
– Self-service (students, instructors, others)
– Administration by non-team members
• Modern tools & UI (for lower barrier of entry)
• Enable more people to troubleshoot, create & destroy environments
Our new cloud-native platform
Goals and use-cases

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• Tech used
– Version 1: Go backend run K8s commands
• Handle everything in our backend
• Used Jenkins X for CI & CD (of our applications)
– Version 2: Leveraged Jenkins X as our provisioning engine
• Automated provisioning of environments for students
• And Helm, Vault, GitHub, Sentry, Datadog
• Concepts and practices
– Configuration and Infrastructure as Code
– 12-factor app
– GitOps
Our new cloud-native platform
Tech, concepts, and practices applied

19. Demo!
...This is where it fails...

20. Technical details
Architecture and components
What is happening behind the scenes

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• Jenkins X
– Pipelines
– GitOps Environments
– Chart installations
• Namespaces, deployments, pod creations,...
• Platform
– Frontend
– Engine
– Env Controller
• Git repo
• Jenkins X Pipeline
• Env Helper
Technical details
• Lab environment definitions
– Helm charts
– Values template

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Technical details
Architecture and components

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Technical details
What is happening behind the scenes
CBU Engine
(backend)
GitOps
repository

24. Key gains
How is this making our lives any better?

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• Everything as code
– Disaster recovery
• Cluster re-creation:
– Terraform + jx boot
• Known instances states:
– Env controller GitOps repo
– Troubleshooting
• Easier to explore
• No unknown manual changes
Key gains
How is this making our lives any better?

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• Standardization
– Practices & tools
• Modularization
– Separation of concerns
– Easier to replace components
• Extensibility
– Inner sourcing
Key gains
How is this making our lives any better?

27. Future
What are we planning to work on next?

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• Integrate with CloudBees University
– SSO
– Seamless self-service labs
• Multi-cluster support
– Scalability & performance
– Enable further separation of environments
– Becoming a wider provisioning engine for CloudBees
• Not just training instances
– e.g. demo environments
Future

29. Building a Cloud Native Platform
to Provide Lab Instances at
CloudBees University
Our journey, choices, tech, practices...
Romén Rodríguez-Gil, CloudBees
Joost van der Griendt, CloudBees