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Declaratively create control planes

In this tutorial, you learn how to configure Argo CD to communicate with a self-hosted Space. This flow allows you to declaratively create and manage control planes from Git. Argo CD is a continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that you can use to drive GitOps flows for your control plane infrastructure.

Prerequisites​

To complete this tutorial, you need the following:

  • Have already deployed an Upbound Space.
  • Have already deployed an instance of Argo CD on a Kubernetes cluster.

Connect your Space to Argo CD​

Fetch the kubeconfig for the Space cluster, the Kubernetes cluster where you installed the Upbound Spaces software. You must add the Space cluster as a context to Argo.

export SPACES_CLUSTER_SERVER="https://url"
export SPACES_CLUSTER_NAME="cluster"

Switch contexts to the Kubernetes cluster where you've installed Argo. Create a secret on the Argo cluster whose data contains the connection details of the Space cluster.

important

Make sure the following commands are executed against your Argo cluster, not your Space cluster.

Run the following command in a terminal:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: space-cluster
  namespace: argocd
  labels:
    argocd.argoproj.io/secret-type: cluster
type: Opaque
stringData:
  name: ${SPACES_CLUSTER_NAME}
  server: ${SPACES_CLUSTER_SERVER}
  config: |
    {
      # configure this section!
    }
EOF
tip

Read the Argo CD documentation to see examples of configuring clusters for various cloud providers' managed Kubernetes services

Create an Argo Application​

Use the Argo CD Application resource to represent a Git repository which contains kind: ControlPlane configuration objects you want deployed in your Space.

Keeping your context pointed at the Argo cluster, run the following command in a terminal:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: control-planes
  namespace: argocd
spec:
  project: default
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/upbound/spaces-reference-arch.git
    targetRevision: HEAD
    path: infrastructure
    directory:
      recurse: true
  destination:
    name: ${SPACES_CLUSTER_NAME}
EOF

This application points at a sample repository which contains a configurations for 3 control planes destined for deployment to a Space.

Inspect the Space​

Once you kick off a sync operation, Argo syncs the desired control planes from Git to your Space cluster. You can confirm this by querying the Space with up:

up ctp list -A

# The output should look like this:
GROUP     NAME          CROSSPLANE    SYNCED   READY   MESSAGE   AGE
default   ctp-dev       1.13.2-up.3   True     True              9d
default   ctp-staging   1.13.2-up.3   True     True              9d
default   ctp-prod      1.13.2-up.3   True     True              9d

Now you can declaratively create new control planes in your Space, update existing ones, or delete them by committing desired state to your Git repository.