SRE Thailand Bootcamp

Week 11: Advanced GitOps — Progressive Delivery

Theme: Canary deployments, blue-green, feature flags with Argo Rollouts.

Learning Objectives

1. Explain progressive delivery concepts (canary, blue-green, A/B)
2. Install and configure Argo Rollouts
3. Write a canary rollout strategy with traffic shifting (Istio or nginx)
4. Integrate with Prometheus metrics for automated promotion/rollback

Reading Materials

• Argo Rollouts Documentation
• Argo Rollouts Concepts
• Istio Traffic Management
• Canary Deployments with Argo Rollouts and Istio
• Flagger Documentation
• Progressive Delivery (RedHat)

Finger Exercises (choose 2)

1. Install Argo Rollouts in kind. Deploy a sample Rollout resource with a canary strategy.
2. Create a canary step: 20% traffic for 5 minutes, then 50% for 5 minutes, then 100%. Use manual promotion.
3. Configure a metric analysis template that checks p99 latency. If p99 > 500ms, abort the rollout.

Project

• Replace the Go app's Deployment with an Argo Rollout
• Configure a canary strategy:
  • Step 1: 10% for 2 minutes (with manual promotion gate)
  • Step 2: 50% for 2 minutes (with automated analysis)
  • Step 3: 100% (full promotion)
• Set up Prometheus metric analysis:
  • http_request_duration_seconds{p99} must stay below 500ms
  • Error rate must stay below 1%
• Demonstrate:
  1. Deploy v1.0.0 → v1.1.0 of the Go app
  2. Watch the canary progress in the Argo Rollouts UI (kubectl argo rollouts dashboard)
  3. Force a rollback by introducing a high-latency endpoint
• (Optional) Integrate with Istio for traffic splitting at the mesh level

Time Budget