Stage 2: GitOps Tooling

The Makefile targets used in Stage 1 invoke Helm to install the applications, using application-specific values files found in the cloned directory (e.g., blueprint/latest/roc-values.yaml) to override the values for the corresponding Helm charts. In an operational setting, all the information needed to deploy a set of Kubernetes applications is checked into a Git repo, with a tool like Fleet automatically updating the deployment whenever it detects changes to the configuration checked into the repo.

To see how this works, look at the resources/deploy.yaml file included in the cloned directory:

apiVersion: fleet.cattle.io/v1alpha1
kind: GitRepo
metadata:
    name: aiab
    namespace: fleet-local
spec:
    repo: "https://github.com/systemsapproach/aether-apps"  # Replace with your fork
    branch: main
paths:
    - aether-2.1-alpha   # Specify one of "aether-2.0" or "aether-2.1-alpha"

This particular version uses https://github.com/systemsapproach/aether-apps as its source repo. Fork that repo and then edit your local deploy.yaml to point to your new repo. Then install Fleet on your Kubernetes cluster by typing:

$ make fleet-ready

Once complete, kubectl will show the cattle-fleet-system namespace running. All that’s left is to type the following command to activate Fleet:

$ kubectl apply -f resources/deploy.yaml

The following command will let you track Fleet as it makes progress installing applications (which Fleet refers to as bundles):

$ kubectl -n fleet-local get bundles

Once complete, you can rerun the same emulated 5G test against Aether:

$ make 5g-test

Once you configure your cluster to use Fleet to deploy the Kubernetes applications, the “clean” targets in the Makefile will no longer work correctly: Fleet will persist in reinstalling any namespaces that have been deleted. You have to first uninstall Fleet by typing:

$ make fleet-clean

before executing the other “clean” targets. Alternatively, leave Fleet running and instead modify your forked copy of the aether-apps repo to no longer include applications you do not want Fleet to automatically instantiate. This mimics how an operator would change a deployment by checking in Configuration-as-Code, a practice that proves useful when supporting live 5G workloads. Until you get to that stage, however, it is probably easiest to continue working with the Makefile targets distributed with Aether OnRamp (which is what we assume in the next stage).