** Recording available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u6GJIU0oi8 ** As software systems become more distributed and complex, the "shift-left" movement brings reliability testing to earlier stages of development. Load testing tools like JMeter, Gatling, and k6, among others, can no longer be considered optional in your CICD pipelines. By including more tools into your processes, you have the side-effect of complicating things even more...but it doesn't have to be so! Introducing Keptn, the cloud-native application life-cycle orchestrator. This Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project, initially created by Dynatrace, aims to facilitate event-based CICD pipelines using GitOps best practices in a declarative manner. Using metrics from your existing observability platform, Keptn can apply Service Level Objective (SLO)-driven quality gates to your multi-stage deliveries, even handling post-production remediations. Join us as Paul demonstrates how Keptn can reduce process fatigue via automation while increasing reliability using testing tools like k6. We already have enough to worry about; let’s add the "easy button" to our deployment lifecycle!

1. Disclaimer
Paul is not a part of the Keptn project, nor has he
ever used it in a production system.
This is a “first look” presentation.
He is simply interested in improving reliability
with Continuous Delivery.
Forgive me…I ran out of time.

2. ● CNCF Incubating Project (as of July ‘22)
● Utilizes Observability Platform
● Based on GitOps
● Declarative & Extensible
● New Lifecycle Toolkit
Cloud-native application life-cycle orchestration.
Automates your SLO-driven, multi-stage delivery and operations &
remediation of your applications.

3. Project Activity
@keptnProject
https://github.com/keptn/keptn
https://github.com/keptn/lifecycle-toolkit

4. Keptn v1
The “OG”

5. Keptn v1
● Dashboard with deployment status
● Automated remediation based on SLOs
● Event-driven using CloudEvents
● GitOps mentality

6. Keptn v1
● Deployment Pipeline with Stages
● Defined within shipyard.yaml
● Lighthouse service to evaluate results
● Configurable alerts
● Quality Gates

7. Keptn v1
No longer the direction
of the project.

8. And that’s all I have to
say about that.
- Forrest Gump

9. Lifecycle Toolkit
Cloud Native

10. Lifecycle Toolkit

11. Lifecycle Toolkit
● Going forward, this is the way.
● Desire to be Kubernetes- and Cloud-Native
● Uses Labels & Annotations to intercept
deployments going to scheduler
● Quality Gates are now Evaluations

12. Lifecycle Toolkit
Three primary use cases:
● Make any deployment observable
● Standardized access to observability data
● Orchestration of deployment checks

13. Make any deployment observable
● Application-aware DORA metrics
○ Deployment Frequency (DF), Lead Time for Changes (LT),
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), Change Failure Rate (CFR)
● Troubleshoot failed deployments
● Trace deployments from Git to Cloud
● Bring your own tool: ArgoCD, Flux, GitLab, etc.

14. Dashboards and Traces

15. Standardized access to observability data
● Define metrics once for your datastore
○ Prometheus, AWS, Azure, GCP, Dynatrace, DataDog
● Access those metrics via Metrics Server or
Kubernetes Metrics API
● Eliminate need for multiple plugins for Argo
Rollouts, KEDA, HPA, etc.

16. Metrics Server

17. Orchestration of deployment checks
● Custom pre-deployment checks
○ Validate external dependencies
○ Confirm clean security scans
● Custom post-deployment checks
○ Execute load tests
○ Send notifications to stakeholders
● Automatic validation against
Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

18. Basic Workflow

19. Demo

20. THIS SLIDE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

21. What I couldn’t show you
● Grafana dashboards for Application deployments
● Traces for deployments in Jaeger or Tempo
● How to connect metrics to the Grafana Cloud
● Trigger a k6 test as a “quality gate”
● probably much more…

22. Project Roadmap
● Multi-stage and Cluster observability
● Instances as first-class types
● Introduce concept of Promotion
● Native container support for Tasks
● Propagate result of Task execution
● and much more…

23. Final Thoughts
My feelings after this initial experimentation.

24. Evaluation
● Great potential
● Confusing message for project
● Documentation gaps
● More examples please
● Reevaluate in 6-12 months
● Will I contribute?... YES (Will you?)
C
* Based upon Paul’s very subjective scoring.
*

25. Thank you!
@javaducky https://github.com/javaducky/demo-keptn