Skip to content

Deploying services (developer's guide)

This is a guide for developers that want to deploy Twined services themselves - it is not needed if Octue manages your services for you or if you are only asking questions to existing Twined services.

What is deployment?

Deploying a Twined service means the service:

  • Is a docker image that is spun up and down in a Kubernetes cluster on demand
  • Is ready at any time to answer questions from users and other Twined services in the service network
  • Can ask questions to any other Twined service in the service network
  • Will automatically spin down after it has finished answering a question
  • Will automatically build and redeploy after a relevant code change (e.g. on push or merge into main)

We can split deployment into service deployment and infrastructure deployment.

Deploying a service

Assuming the service network infrastructure already exists, a service can be deployed by building and pushing its docker image to the service network's Artifact Registry repository. We recommend pushing a new image for each release of the code e.g. on merge into the main branch. Each new image is the deployment of a new service revision. This can be done automatically:

  • Follow the instructions to add the build-twined-service GitHub Actions workflow to your service's GitHub repository. Set its trigger to merge or push to main (see example below)
  • This needs to be done once for every service you want to deploy
  • A live example can be found here including automated pre-deployment testing and creation of a GitHub release

You can now ask your service some questions! It will be available in the service network as <namespace>/<name>:<version> (e.g. octue/example-service-kueue:0.1.1).

Deploying the infrastructure

Prerequisites

Twined services are currently deployable to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You must have "owner" level access to the GCP project you're deploying to and billing must be set up for it.

Deploying step-by-step

There are two steps to deploying the infrastructure:

  1. Deploy the core infrastructure (storage bucket, event store, IAM service accounts and roles)
  2. Deploy the Kubernetes cluster, event handler, service registry, and Pub/Sub topic

1. Deploy core infrastructure

  • Follow the instructions to deploy the resources in the terraform-octue-twined-core Terraform module
  • This only needs to be done once per service network

2. Deploy Kubernetes cluster

  • Follow the instructions to deploy the resources in the terraform-octue-twined-cluster Terraform module
  • This only needs to be done once per service network