Faster, Smoother Installs with Brigade 2.3.1

Hello again, Brigadiers!

We’ve never been so excited to tell anyone about a patch release as we are today. Brigade v2.3.1 may be our smallest release to date, but it packs a big punch!

All versions of Brigade prior to this one experienced a lot of “flapping” during initial installation. Our API server depends on both a MongoDB database and an Artemis (ActiveMQ) messaging server. In the common case, the API server would come up before the database and messaging server were ready and would crash. Since Brigade runs inside Kubernetes, that’s ok, right? Kubernetes will restart the pod! We relied on this behavior for quite some time. The problem, however, is that while the API server was waiting for the database and messaging server to become available, our scheduler and observer components (microservices) were also waiting – for the API server to become available. They too would crash and restart repeatedly until the API server became available. The inevitable result was most of our pods would be in a CrashLoopBackOff and it could sometimes take a considerable amount of time for those to resolve.

Feeling we did not need to settle for this, v2.3.1 components block internally while waiting for their network-bound dependencies to be satisfied. The rationale for this is that the system, as a whole, installs and starts faster if individual components wait longer for their dependencies to be satisfied instead of crashing repeatedly and trying again in a progressive back-off. The end result is that Brigade v2.3.1 installs faster, with no “flapping.”

We really hope that this faster, smoother installation process makes Brigade easier and more approachable than ever before for new Brigadiers!

Happy scripting, everyone! And until next time, remember you can always find the maintainers on the #brigade channel on the Kubernetes Slack if you have questions or need help getting started!