This article is the second one of the series dedicated to Flagger. In a nutshell, Flagger is a progressive delivery tool that automates the release process for applications running on Kubernetes. It reduces the risk of introducing a new software version in production by gradually shifting traffic to the new version while measuring metrics and running conformance tests.

Make sure you have a local Kubernetes cluster running with the service mesh Istio. If you don’t, read the first article: Flagger - Get Started with Istio and Kubernetes.In this second guide, we will focus on the installation of Flagger and run multiple canary deployments of the application Mirror HTTP Server (MHS). Remember that this dummy application can simulate valid and invalid responses based on the request. This is exactly what we need to test the capabilities of Flagger. We will cover both happy (rollout) and unhappy (rollback) scenarios.

This is a hands-on guide and can be followed step by step on MacOS. It will require some adjustments if you are using a Windows or Linux PC. It is important to note that this article will not go into details and only grasp the concepts & technologies so if you are not familiar with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm or Istio, I strongly advise you to check some documentation yourself before continuing reading.

Installing Flagger

#kubernetes #flagger #helm #istio #software-engineering