Systems

Systems in Ctrlplane are the highest level of organizational units, designed to group related deployments and environments together. They provide a structured approach to managing complex deployment pipelines and enforcing consistency across your infrastructure.

Key Features of Systems

• Deployment Organization: Systems contain information about all associated deployments, allowing for centralized management.
• Environment Standardization: All deployments within a system share the same set of environments, ensuring consistency across the deployment pipeline.
• Scalability: Systems can accommodate as many deployments and environments as needed, supporting growth and complexity in your infrastructure.
• Deployment Cycle Alignment: Commonly used to group applications with similar deployment cycles, facilitating coordinated releases.
• Access Control: Systems provide a natural boundary for implementing role-based access control (RBAC) policies.

System Structure

1. Deployments: Each system can contain multiple deployments, representing different applications or services.
2. Environments: Systems define a set of environments (e.g., Development, QA, Staging, Production) that are shared across all associated deployments.
3. Policies: System-level policies can be applied to govern deployment processes across all included deployments and environments.
4. Configurations: Shared configurations can be defined at the system level and inherited by deployments.

Benefits of Using Systems

• Consistency: Enforce uniform environments and deployment processes across related projects.
• Simplified Management: Centralize configuration and policy management at the system level.
• Efficient Onboarding: Quickly set up new deployments with pre-configured environments and policies.
• Coordinated Releases: Facilitate synchronized deployments for applications with interdependencies.
• Improved Visibility: Gain a holistic view of related deployments and their statuses.
• Streamlined Governance: Apply security and compliance policies consistently across all deployments within a system.

Best Practices

1. Logical Grouping: Create systems based on application domains, teams, or deployment cycles.
2. Standardized Environments: Define a consistent set of environments that make sense for your development and release processes.
3. Policy Enforcement: Implement system-wide policies to ensure compliance and security across all deployments.
4. Regular Review: Periodically assess and update system configurations to align with evolving organizational needs.

Example Use Case

A typical use of systems might involve grouping all microservices for a particular product:

• System: “E-commerce Platform”

  • Environments: Dev, QA, Staging, Production

  • Deployments:

    • User Authentication Service
    • Product Catalog Service
    • Order Processing Service
    • Payment Gateway Service

  • Shared Configurations:

    • Database connection strings
    • API gateway settings

  • System-wide Policies:

    • Automated rollback on failed deployments
    • Required approvals for production deployments

By organizing these services under one system, you ensure they all progress through the same environments and adhere to consistent deployment policies, facilitating a coordinated release process for the entire e-commerce platform.

How should I organize my deployments into systems?

Focus on these two crucial aspects:

1. Deployment Resources: Ensure that all deployments within a system share identical deployment resources. This is crucial because deployment pipelines are structured to perform deployments on a uniform set of resources within the system.
2. Environments: Ensure that all deployments within a system operate within the same environments and adhere to the same environment policies.

Although this method may seem prescriptive, it provides a strong framework for managing deployments. It encourages the separation of software from infrastructure, leading to enhanced maintainability and fostering improved system ownership.