Deploying a Kubernetes Cluster with orcharhino

Deploying applications using orcharhino usually starts with creating and configuring the hosts that will serve the application.

With complex applications consisting of multiple hosts, this becomes pretty tedious, especially if you want to deploy the application multiple times.
You can redeploy an application if you want to apply certain changes, or for example use it in a production and a development environment.
To make the deployment easier, the common approach is to work with solutions like Ansible or Puppet.

A typical application deployment with Ansible consists of the following steps:

1. Create hosts
2. Provision hosts
3. Create an inventory and group hosts
4. Adjust group variables for the environment
5. Run Ansible roles to deploy the application on the inventory

Notice that all these steps have to be repeated each time you want to deploy a new instance.

ou can use orcharhino with ACD as a much more efficient solution for this workflow.
With an existing Ansible Playbook and host groups, application deployments become as easy as adjusting variables and clicking Deploy.

Perform the following steps to deploy your application using ACD:

1. One time only: import the Ansible Playbook used to deploy your application onto preprovisioned hosts.
2. One time only: create an Application Definition specifying the host groups and valid number of instances per service.
3. Define an Application Instance.
4. Optional: adjust group and host variables for that instance.
5. Click Deploy.

orcharhino creates all required hosts and provisions them according to their host group.

When all hosts have been set up, an inventory will be generated and the Ansible Playbook is executed.