About O-Neko

O-Neko is a Kubernetes-native application that allows to cross a bridge between developers and other stakeholders by deploying development versions of your software into Kubernetes via Helm to allow everybody to try and test them.

Features

The most important features of O-Neko are:

• Deploy development versions (e.g. every branch) to Kubernetes with one click
• Configure projects via Helm charts
• Automatically re-deploy running versions when the corresponding Docker image has changed (configurable per project and version)
• Automatically stop running versions after or at a specific time (configurable per project and version)
• Select variables that allow fast changes to frequently used configuration settings (e.g. server URLs)

Pre-requisites

Generally, nearly every project able to run in Kubernetes can be deployed with O-Neko. To run a project in O-Neko:

• You need Docker containers of all project versions you want to deploy with O-Neko
• You need Helm charts for each project you want to deploy. The charts need to be hosted in a chart registry.
  • Currently we support standard Helm chart registries and Helm GCS
  • The Docker image tag and the image pull policy need to be configurable
• O-Neko works with kubernetes versions 1.9.0 - 1.19.1 (these versions are officially supported by the client library we use)

How does it work?

• O-Neko is running inside your Kubernetes cluster (at least this is our recommendation - you could run it outside as well as long as it is able to access your cluster).
• A project consists of a Docker image that resides in any Docker registry. O-Neko is polling all tags that are available for this image and lets you deploy them.
• The configuration is done with native Kubernetes .yaml and template variables. O-Neko provides some variables (e.g. the docker image tag), but you can also define your own. The configuration and the variables can be overridden by specific versions.
• When a version of a project is deployed, O-Neko creates a namespace in Kubernetes to deploy all resources to. If you stop a deployment, the corresponding namespace will be deleted.
• The status of all running deployments is monitored by O-Neko and can be seen on the web frontend

O-Neko vocabulary

In O-Neko as well as in this documentation we often use terms that may be misunderstood for something else. We want to clarify what specific words mean in the context of O-Neko.

Project

A project is the entry point for deploying an application with O-Neko. Projects have a direct association with a Docker image. Theoretically you can also have multiple projects referencing the same Docker image. A project can have multiple versions. Projects can be configured using configuration templates.

Project Version

A project version is associated with a tag of the project’s docker image. A project version inherits the project’s configuration templates but can also override them or add entirely new configuration templates. A project version can be deployed and automatically updated if the docker tag gets pushed again with different contents (based on the checksum). This is especially useful for scenarios where the docker tags are not used to reference e.g. a fixed commit but rather are a pointer to a current working copy (e.g. “the most recent version of the branch feature/my-new-feature”).

Configuration template

A configuration template is a native Helm values .yaml file (e.g. a service definition). Variable placeholders like `` can be used to insert O-Neko specific variables into these templates. The variables can be overridden in project versions to e.g. achieve slightly different configurations of versions without having to modify the templates per version.

Select variables

Select variables are template variables with pre-defined values. If (e.g.) your application needs to connect to an external service E, you could have a variable consisting of the hostnames of the production, test and development versions of E and you could quickly choose which instance of E to connect to from the O-Neko dashboard.

Docker registries

Docker registries in O-Neko are references to the registries your projects’ images are pulled from. To briefly learn how to set up a reference to a docker registry please see the “Show O-Neko your Docker Registry” section in the getting started.

Helm registries

Helm registries in O-Neko are references to the registries your Helm charts reside in.

Namespaces

Namespaces are references to namespaces in your Kubernetes cluster. You need to create at least one namespace to create and deploy a project. Namespaces created via O-Neko are automatically created in your Kubernetes cluster. The namespace names are prefixed with on-.

Activity Log

While not feature complete the activity log shows a basic history of some actions happening in your O-Neko installation (e.g. a project has been edited or new docker tags/project versions have been found).

Users and roles

O-Neko has user management with a very basic permission scheme consisting of three roles:

Role	Description
VIEWER	Can view projects (and versions) and deploy them or stop deployments. Can not modify them or change the configurations except of select variables that are displayed on the O-Neko dashboard.
DOER	Can also create and modify projects.
ADMIN	Can also manage users, docker registries and namespaces.