Add a New Cluster Profile

This document lays out the process of getting a new cluster profile added to the test platform so that jobs can begin using it.

What Is a Cluster Profile?

The cluster_profile is a ci-operator concept that bundles together a couple of concepts to make it easier to configure jobs and steps that can operate on different cloud infrastructures.

When a cluster_profile is added to a job or workflow, the following actions occur:

• all steps in the workflow will have credentials mounted at $CLUSTER_PROFILE_DIR for cloud accounts, image registries, etc.
• the test will implicitly ask for a lease and expose it with $LEASED_RESOURCE
• all steps in the test will implicitly declare dependencies on imported OpenShift release images
• all steps will have a number of environment variables set, such as $CLUSTER_TYPE, $IMAGE_FORMAT, and $KUBECONFIG

Generally, the major difference between cluster_profiles is the content of the credentials.

Prepare the cloud account

In order for most workflows to operate with the cluster profile, the cloud account must be prepared, including creating a new IAM user as described in the OCP document (AWS, GCP).

Some common roles might needed in addition to the ones created by the OCP document:

AWS:

• CloudFormationFullAccess

GCP:

• Deployment Manager Editor
• Compute Image User
• Role Administrator

Adding a New Cluster Profile

When adding a new cluster_profile, three major steps must be taken: registering the profile inside of ci-operator, adding the new leases to Boskos, and providing the credentials.

Registering a New Profile

As cluster-profiles are handled as first-class items in the ci-operator configuration, a new pull request (example) must be sent to the openshift/ci-tools repository in order to register a new profile. The next sections detail the requirements for opening this pull request. All changes required in openshift/ci-tools are isolated to a single file, pkg/api/types.go. The process of creating a new cluster profile involves adding:

• ClusterProfile: a new constant for the name of the profile.
• ClusterProfiles(): a new item in the list of valid test profiles.
• ClusterProfile::ClusterType(): a mapping from the profile to its cluster type.
• ClusterProfile::LeaseType(): a mapping from the profile to its lease type.
• LeaseTypeFromClusterType(): a mapping from cluster type to lease type, if a new type is being added (this is only used for legacy template tests).
• ClusterProfile::ConfigMap(): a switch label if the profile requires its own ConfigMap.
• ClusterProfile::Secret(): a switch label if the profile shares credentials with another.

Cluster type

This value is passed to tests via the CLUSTER_TYPE environment variable, as mentioned in the introduction. It is used for cloud-provider-specific behavior by step registry components such as the OpenShift installer steps (e.g.).

For profiles created for completely new platforms, this should be a unique value and will probably require corresponding changes to the installation steps. Profiles which are derivatives of existing ones should likely retain the cluster type unless they require special treatment in the installation process.

Adding New Leases

In the pull request to openshift/ci-tools, the mapping between a cluster_profile and the implicit lease that will be requested is determined. The standard is to use leases named <name>-quota-slice, so the aws profile uses aws-quota-slice. The resources for leasing must be registered with our leasing server (example).

Providing Credentials

The credentials provided to tests that declare a cluster_profile are a mix of content owned by the test platform and content owned by the users adding a new cluster_profile. The secret used to hold this content is cluster-secrets-<name>, so the aws profile uses cluster-secrets-aws. When adding a new profile, a pull request must change the ci-secret-bootstrap configuration to seed this credential with content owned by the platform, like central pull secrets for image registries (example). In addition, any user-provided secrets must be added using the self-service portal to add it to the clusters, using the following keys in Vault (the destination namespace/name needs to match the item added to the ci-secret-bootstrap config):

1
2

secretsync/target-namespace: "ci"
secretsync/target-name: "cluster-secrets-<name>"

The openshift/ci-tools pull request should also include instructions on how the data provided should be assembled into a volume mount for the test containers. The code is structured so that common cases require few or no changes. These are:

• Credentials are mounted using a simple Secret mount.
  • The convention is for the secret to be named cluster-secrets-<name>, in which case no change is required.
  • In some cases, derivative profiles may want to use the same credentials as the original. All existing profiles follow the convention of being named after their CLUSTER_TYPE, so usually a single new switch label is required in this case.
• A ConfigMap is required for the profile. The convention is for it to be named cluster-profile-<name>, in which case a single new switch label is required.

Storing AWS credentials as secrets

Some workflows will provision resources before installing the cluster (e.g., ipi-aws. These types of workflows requires AWS credentials exposed to the workflow as a Vault secret. It’s important to note that the secret must contain a key-value pair where the key name is .awscred and the value is the contents of an AWS credentials file. Replace the placeholder values as appropriate:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=<placeholder-id>
aws_secret_access_key=<placeholder-secret>

Storing SSH key pairs

In addition to credentials, some workflows (e.g., ipi-aws) require ssh keys, which allow you to access CI clusters. This can be important for debugging issues. We recommend generating a new key pair specifically for CI usage.

SSH key pairs are also stored in Vault, just like provider credentials. They should be stored within the same secret as the provider credentials, but as separate key-value pairs. You’ll have two new key-value pairs, where the keys are ssh-publickey and ssh-privatekey and they store the file contents of the SSH public and private key, respectively.

Private Cluster Profiles

To restrict the usage of your cluster profile to specific organizations and repositories, you can create a pull request in the openshift/release repository. Within the pull request, add your repository or organization to the allowlist.

For detailed instructions please refer to the README file.

VPN connection

For platforms that need access to restricted environments, ci-operator supports adding a dedicated VPN connection to each test step. Since this is a requirement of specific platforms, it is triggered by special files in the cluster profile(s) associated with those platforms. This process is transparent to the test command: when a VPN connection is requested at the test level, it is set up automatically by the test platform with no changes required to individual tests.

Cluster profile

VPN connections are requested by the presence of a special file named vpn.yaml in the cluster profile, detected when the test steps are about to be executed. This file should have the following fields:

• image: pull spec of the image to be used for the VPN client container.
• commands: the name of another file in the cluster profile (e.g. openvpn.sh) which contains the VPN client’s entry point script. This script is effectively executed as bash -c "$(<f")", where f is the value associated with the commands key.
• wait_timeout: the maximum amount of time the step script should wait before starting (detailed in the next section). This ensures the steps are not blocked until the test timeout (several hours) expires if any problems occur with the VPN client.

Image

The image used for the VPN client should contain the packages necessary to establish the connection, as well as the bash shell to execute the container’s entry point script.

The pull spec placed in the cluster profile can point to images stored anywhere, but the simplest setup is to build and store them in the central CI cluster. Builds are configured in openshift/release in the supplemental images directory (see for example the OpenVPN image build).

Once the BuildConfig is merged into master and the image is built and tagged, the cluster profile can reference the public pull spec. For the OpenVPN image stream from the example above, that would be:

1
2

image: registry.ci.openshift.org/ci/openvpn:latest
# …

Client container

The container should execute the VPN client to establish the connection. It will reside in the same network namespace as the test container, so no special provisions are necessary to make the networking changes usable by the test program. When executed, the entry point program will be located in the directory where the cluster profile files are mounted, so all secrets will be available and can be referenced with a relative path.

In addition to executing the client, the container has also two synchronization points:

• When the connection has been established and the test script should start, a file named /tmp/vpn/up should be created. For OpenVPN, for example, the following options can be used:

1

openvpn --script-security 2 --route-up '/bin/bash -c "touch /tmp/vpn/up"' …

• The script should watch for the creation of a file indicating that the main test has finished and then exit so that the test can terminate properly. This marker file is created automatically by the CI infrastructure at /logs/marker-file.txt. The client can perform these actions with a script such as:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

function exit_with_test() {
    until [[ -f /logs/marker-file.txt ]]; do sleep 1; done
    while :; do kill 1; sleep 1; done
}

exit_with_test &
# run the VPN client