Infrastructure

• Infrastructure
  • Available environments
    • Core Environment
    • Integration Environment
  • Environment Setup
  • Tools
    • Argo CD
    • Vault
    • Grafana
    • Goldilocks
  • Infrastructure Maintenance
  • Fair Play Policy CX-Environments
    • Purpose
    • Equal Access to Resources
    • Fair Usage Guidelines
    • Consequences of Violation

Infrastructure involves the functionality of deploying, provision of a virtual environment and tools for monitoring applications to ensure the quality and functionality of software products. This document outlines the technology and processes involved in our infrastructure.

Available environments

The following environments are currently available.

Core Environment

Tool	URL
Vault	https://vault.core.catena-x.net

Integration Environment

Tool	URL
ArgoCD	https://argocd.int.catena-x.net
Grafana	https://grafana.int.catena-x.net
Goldilocks	https://goldilocks.int.catena-x.net

Environment Setup

This diagram provides an overview on how the environments are set up. In this example the integration environment is shown. ArgoCD deploys the apps of the product teams in the int cluster by reading the configured secrets from the vault in the core cluster and pulling the image of the service from the GHCR. With this architecture, no product team has to directly access Azure for service deployments.

flowchart BT
  subgraph github["GitHub"]
    GitHub_ghcr[GitHub Container Registry]
    GitHub_org[GitHub Organizations]
  end
  subgraph AKS_int["INT cluster"]
    ArgoCD["ArgoCD \n argocd.int.catena-x.net"]
    ServiceDeployment[Product apps]
    Grafana
    Goldilocks
  end
  subgraph AKS_core["Core cluster"]
    Vault["Vault \n vault.core.catena-x.net "]
  end
  ArgoCD -- " get secrets " --> Vault
  ArgoCD -- " deploys " --> ServiceDeployment
  ArgoCD -- " pull images " --> GitHub_ghcr
  ArgoCD -- " authenticate user " --> GitHub_org

Tools

Argo CD

• Purpose: Continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.
• Features:
  • Automated deployments
  • Version control of deployments
  • Rollbacks to previous versions

Vault

• Purpose: Store secrets for deployment configurations.
• Features:
  • Secret management
  • Usable in Argo CD with Argo-Vault Plugin

Grafana

• Purpose: Monitoring of resources of the product teams
• Features:
  • Dashboards for monitoring
  • Alerting

Goldilocks

• Purpose: Resource usage recommendations for the product teams
• Features:
  • Resource recommendations
  • Cost savings if applied by the product teams

Infrastructure Maintenance

• INT-Environment: last Sunday of each month -> Products should check their deployments after downtime

Fair Play Policy CX-Environments

To ensure a fair use of the resources provided by the Catena-X Association, we'd like to propose a Fair Play Policy.

Purpose

This Fair Play Policy outlines the acceptable use of resources within our platform, ensuring that all product teams have equitable access and a positive experience. We aim to prevent misuse or excessive consumption of resources that could negatively impact other product teams. By adhering to this policy, users contribute to maintaining a cost-efficient and sustainable environment, ensuring that resources are available to everyone at a reasonable cost.

Equal Access to Resources

All product teams are entitled to fair and equal access to the resources provided by our platform. No individual or group should engage in actions that monopolize resources, impair performance, or degrade the experience of others.

Fair Usage Guidelines

To promote fair play and responsible resource usage:

• Reasonable Resource requests and limits: Product teams should adhere to reasonable usage of CPU and Memory, to ensure optimal service for all. To get a hint on how the request/limit for your container should be, please take a look in Goldilocks (links can be found in the environments section). Especially CPU and Memory recommendations should be considered. Since there isn't much of a load on the systems (excluding testing before a release), the apps won't need many resources.
• Monitor your Namespace in ArgoCD: You should regularly check your resource usage, requests and limits in your namespace. This can be done with Grafana, here you can find many dashboards, that support you with that.

Consequences of Violation

If a product team is found to be in violation of this Fair Play Policy, the following actions may be taken:

• Issuing a notice to inform the product team of the violation/improper usage.
• The system team might proactively create pull requests with decreased values for resource request/limits in the product teams repository.
• If a product team is not responding after several attempts of communication (via GitHub, MS Teams, Email), we reserve the right to delete the resources created with ArgoCD by the product team. This may also apply, if no one is actively working on a product that is already deployed on any environment.