Building services

We now know how to run and stop services. But how to actually build them? Before we build one from scratch, let's start with modifying our example service a little bit. Instead of showing environment variables in random order we will return them in an ordered manner sorted by variable name.

Our change is in place, we'll now use another Armada command to build new service image:

If you used docker before, this kind of output should look familiar. In fact what we did now is we've built a new docker image containing our modified service. This time, to run it we'll use a new parameter -d local. It prevents Armada from downloading service image from its default repository. Rather it will use the image we've just built that resides on your local docker repository.

Indeed the output is now sorted!

As you can see modifying existing service, running it, and verifying changes is a matter of few simple steps. You don't have to install the entire environment required by the service in your system which is often very time-consuming and can leave unnecessary mess. Also, sometimes it can be almost impossible when services have conflicting requirements (different glibc versions etc.). With docker it's no more the case.

Dockyard - service image repository

Another concept that we've mentioned before is service image repository - a place where you store all your service images ready to be deployed. Armada uses docker repositories which we conveniently call dockyards. You can use your existing docker repository if you have one or create your own using helper Armada service.

We have added parameter -p 10000:80, because this time we want the dockyard to be available at constant address (port 10000), not at some random port assigned by docker.

Parameter -v works the same way as in docker. That means directory /tmp/mydockyard from your machine will be mapped to directory /repository inside dockyard service that we've just run.

It's important to remember that containers running our services don't maintain their state after stopping them. In order to preserve data produced by the service (in our case it's a repository of service images) we can mount directories from inside container to your host machine.

Let Armada know about our newly created repository.

The warning message above tells us that the image repository we're going to use is not trusted. It is served with non-secure HTTP protocol, not using any SSL certificates. If we want Docker to be able to push/pull to this repository we have to add it to the "insecure-registry" list.

The easiest way to do it is by running those 3 above commands that Armada conveniently prepared for us. After running them, we can try:

Using command armada dockyard list we can see a list of image repositories which Armada knows about. You can have as many repositories as you need, for example local company repository and remote production repository.

First listed repository (alias armada) is a public Armada repository that contains a number of helper services (such as already known example, dockyard) and armada itself. That's where we were downloading those services from in previous parts.

After adding our new repository, Armada has set it to default (-> sign), which means armada run will look for service images there in the first place.

But first, we have to upload something there.

If you want to upload image to dockyard which is not currently default, you can use -d parameter, e.g. armada push example -d production_aws.

We can check that the image is in fact stored on our machine:

Upgrading services

Now, instead of simply running the service, let's do something different. Let's try to upgrade one of our example services run in previous parts. Remember?

Upgrading a service can be as simple as restarting it with newly built image.

The results are now sorted, and we can see that the variable MICROSERVICE_ENV is preserved. The same would be true for other parameters supplied for the first time that we started this service.

To sum it up, upgrading a service with Armada is a breeze!

Now, how about creating new one?