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Keel

Kubernetes Operator to automate Helm, DaemonSet, StatefulSet & Deployment updates

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Don't do it by hand, ever

kubectl is the new SSH. If you are using it to update production workloads, you are doing it wrong. See examples on how to automate application updates.

Open Source & Self-Hosted

Single command, no dependencies. No lock-in, no custom configuration files. Start using now.

No CLI/API required

Runs as a single container, no database required. Policies and trigger types are specified in your application deployment files or Helm charts.

Keel high level diagram

Easy as 1, 2, 3

  1. Deploy Keel into your cluster, installation instructions can be found here.

  2. Modify your deployment manifest with policy annotations:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata: 
  name: wd
  namespace: default
  labels: 
    name: "wd"
  annotations:
    keel.sh/policy: minor # <-- policy name according to https://semver.org/
    keel.sh/trigger: poll # <-- actively query registry, otherwise defaults to webhooks
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      name: wd
      labels:
        app: wd        
    spec:
      containers:                    
        - image: karolisr/webhook-demo:0.0.8
          imagePullPolicy: Always            
          name: wd
          command: ["/bin/webhook-demo"]
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8090

Additional policies such as wildcard, regex and force are available, read more here.

That's it, third step is automated, Keel will do it. Once you deploy it, Keel will be looking for new versions and automatically updating your resource once a new image is available.

Admin Dashboard (only available with 'latest' image)

Keel has an optional, easy to use web UI for quick policy updates, approval management and audit logs:

Keel Web UI

See how to enable admin dashboard here.

Policy Driven Updates

Use policies to define when you want your application to be updated. Providers can have different mechanisms of getting configuration for your application, but policies are consistent across all of them. Following semver.org best practices allows you to safely automate application updates.

Available policies:

  • all: update whenever there is a version bump or a new prerelease created (ie: 1.0.0 -> 1.0.1-rc1)
  • major: update major & minor & patch versions
  • minor: update only minor & patch versions (ignores major)
  • patch: update only patch versions (ignores minor and major versions)
  • force: force update even if tag is not semver, ie: latest, optional label: keel.sh/match-tag=true which will enforce that only the same tag will trigger force update.
  • glob: use wildcards to match versions, example:

Policy configuration docs can be viewed here.

Approvals

Users can specify on their Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts how many approvals do they have to collect before a resource gets updated. Approvals can be collected through the web admin dashboard, HTTP API, Slack and HipChat. Read more about approvals in the docs.

Keel Friends

  • Webhook Relay allows Keel to receive webhooks and connect to admin dashboard without configuring public IP/domains.
  • Sunstone allows users to always deploy latest semver tags without continuously updating your docs and deployment yamls.