Continuous delivery has been a driving force behind software development, testing and deployment for years, and CI/CD best-practices are evolving with the advent of new technologies like Kubernetes and Istio. Progressive delivery, a term coined by James Governor, Redmonk, is a new approach to continuous delivery that includes “a new basket of skills and technologies… Such as canarying, feature flags, [and] A/B testing at scale”. In this webinar we will cover how to use GitOps workflows with canary releases and traffic mirroring to realize progressive delivery how to use Weaveworks Flagger to automate canary releases and visualize the results with Aspen Mesh

1. WEBINAR:
Automating Canary Deployments with
Weave Flagger and Aspen Mesh
Andrew Jenkins, Aspen Mesh
Sebastian Bernheim, Weaveworks
August 29, 2019

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3. 3
Speaker Introduction
Andrew Jenkins, CTO
Andrew Jenkins is the senior architect at Aspen
Mesh, where he’s building out an enterprise
service mesh to help organizations take the
burden out of managing microservices. A
software and network architect for container
environments like Kubernetes, Andrew has a
history of technical leadership driving fast-
moving teams toward tangible outcomes.
Andrew also has experience in software and
hardware testing, FPGAs, and board design for
space scientific instruments
Sebastian Bernheim, Customer Success
Sebastian is a Customer Success Engineer at
Weaveworks. Sebastian is a codeslinger and
system wrangler with an abiding passion for
learning and sharing technology. After one score
and three years spent building, breaking and
fixing software, his current mission is to help
customers succeed by fostering developer
innovation.
Sebastian is also a three-peat progenitor, maker of
omelets, and an accomplished dog wrestler. He
currently resides in Jersey City, New Jersey.

4. GitOps provides an operating model
for Kubernetes that allows
development teams to gain velocity
while maintaining certainty.
Git as single source of truth means you
can trace code changes through time
to see who changed what and why.
Canary releases and traffic mirroring
are powerful GitOps tools that can help
realize progressive delivery.
GitOps drives progressive delivery

5. Weave Cloud GitOps Deploy
Weave Cloud
Deploy

6. Flagger

7. Demo

8. Old
New
Success
100%
0% Shift
Measure
v1
v1
v2
v2
10...50%
v2
v2
v2
v2
v1
v1

9. Old
New
Fail
100%
0%
Shift
Measure
v1
v1
v2
v2
10...50%
v1
v1
v1
v1

10. Mirroring
A special pre-stage where requests are duplicated: one copy goes to primary and
one copy to canary.
Users see only the response from the primary. The service mesh collects metrics
and traces on the canary response, then discards.
Pros: If the canary is a bad release, you can detect it while sending 0% bad
responses to users (instead of 10%)
Cons: Mirrored requests must be idempotent (GETs and special kinds of writes).
Deduct $100 from andrews_account
Get andrews_account balance
Set andrews_timezone to MDT
✔

11. Success
100%
0% Shift
Measure
v1
v1
v2
v2
10...50%
v2
v2
v2
v2
v1
v1
Mirror Measure
v1
v1
v2
Mirror

12. Demo

13. Questions?

14. Thank you!