Version: v1.0

How-to

In this section, it will introduce how to use CUE to declare app components via ComponentDefinition.

Before reading this part, please make sure you’ve learned the Definition CRD in KubeVela.

Declare ComponentDefinition

Here is a CUE based ComponentDefinition example which provides a abstraction for stateless workload type:

apiVersion: core.oam.dev/v1beta1
kind: ComponentDefinition
metadata:
  name: stateless
spec:
  workload:
    definition:
      apiVersion: apps/v1
      kind: Deployment
  schematic:
    cue:
      template: |
        parameter: {
            name:  string
            image: string
        }
        output: {
            apiVersion: "apps/v1"
            kind:       "Deployment"
            spec: {
                selector: matchLabels: {
                    "app.oam.dev/component": parameter.name
                }
                template: {
                    metadata: labels: {
                        "app.oam.dev/component": parameter.name
                    }
                    spec: {
                        containers: [{
                            name:  parameter.name
                            image: parameter.image
                        }]
                    }
                }
            }
        }

In detail:

• .spec.workload is required to indicate the workload type of this component.
• .spec.schematic.cue.template is a CUE template, specifically:
  • The output filed defines the template for the abstraction.
  • The parameter filed defines the template parameters, i.e. the configurable properties exposed in the Applicationabstraction (and JSON schema will be automatically generated based on them).

Let’s declare another component named task, i.e. an abstraction for run-to-completion workload.

apiVersion: core.oam.dev/v1beta1
kind: ComponentDefinition
metadata:
  name: task
  annotations:
    definition.oam.dev/description: "Describes jobs that run code or a script to completion."
spec:
  workload:
    definition:
      apiVersion: batch/v1
      kind: Job
  schematic:
    cue:
      template: |
        output: {
          apiVersion: "batch/v1"
          kind:       "Job"
          spec: {
            parallelism: parameter.count
            completions: parameter.count
            template: spec: {
              restartPolicy: parameter.restart
              containers: [{
                image: parameter.image
                if parameter["cmd"] != _|_ {
                  command: parameter.cmd
                }
              }]
            }
          }
        }
        parameter: {
          count:   *1 | int
          image:   string
          restart: *"Never" | string
          cmd?: [...string]
        }

Save above ComponentDefinition objects to files and install them to your Kubernetes cluster by $ kubectl apply -f stateless-def.yaml task-def.yaml

Declare an Application

The ComponentDefinition can be instantiated in Application abstraction as below:

apiVersion: core.oam.dev/v1alpha2
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: website
spec:
  components:
    - name: hello
      type: stateless
      properties:
        image: crccheck/hello-world
        name: mysvc
    - name: countdown
      type: task
      properties:
        image: centos:7
        cmd:
          - "bin/bash"
          - "-c"
          - "for i in 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ; do echo $i ; done"

Under The Hood

Above application resource will generate and manage following Kubernetes resources in your target cluster based on the output in CUE template and user input in Application properties.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: backend
  ... # skip tons of metadata info
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: mysvc
          image: crccheck/hello-world
    metadata:
      labels:
        app.oam.dev/component: mysvc
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app.oam.dev/component: mysvc
---
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: countdown
  ... # skip tons of metadata info
spec:
  parallelism: 1
  completions: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      name: countdown
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: countdown
          image: 'centos:7'
          command:
            - bin/bash
            - '-c'
            - for i in 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ; do echo $i ; done
      restartPolicy: Never

CUE Context

KubeVela allows you to reference the runtime information of your application via context keyword.

The most widely used context is application name(context.appName) component name(context.name).

context: {
  appName: string
  name: string
}

For example, let’s say you want to use the component name filled in by users as the container name in the workload instance:

parameter: {
    image: string
}
output: {
  ...
    spec: {
        containers: [{
            name:  context.name
            image: parameter.image
        }]
    }
  ...
}

Note that context information are auto-injected before resources are applied to target cluster.

Full available information in CUE context

Composition

It’s common that a component definition is composed by multiple API resources, for example, a webserver component that is composed by a Deployment and a Service. CUE is a great solution to achieve this in simplified primitives.

Another approach to do composition in KubeVela of course is using Helm.

How-to

KubeVela requires you to define the template of workload type in output section, and leave all the other resource templates in outputs section with format as below:

outputs: <unique-name>: 
  <full template data>

The reason for this requirement is KubeVela needs to know it is currently rendering a workload so it could do some “magic” like patching annotations/labels or other data during it.

Below is the example for webserver definition:

apiVersion: core.oam.dev/v1beta1
kind: ComponentDefinition
metadata:
  name: webserver
  annotations:
    definition.oam.dev/description: "webserver is a combo of Deployment + Service"
spec:
  workload:
    definition:
      apiVersion: apps/v1
      kind: Deployment
  schematic:
    cue:
      template: |
        output: {
            apiVersion: "apps/v1"
            kind:       "Deployment"
            spec: {
                selector: matchLabels: {
                    "app.oam.dev/component": context.name
                }
                template: {
                    metadata: labels: {
                        "app.oam.dev/component": context.name
                    }
                    spec: {
                        containers: [{
                            name:  context.name
                            image: parameter.image
                            if parameter["cmd"] != _|_ {
                                command: parameter.cmd
                            }
                            if parameter["env"] != _|_ {
                                env: parameter.env
                            }
                            if context["config"] != _|_ {
                                env: context.config
                            }
                            ports: [{
                                containerPort: parameter.port
                            }]
                            if parameter["cpu"] != _|_ {
                                resources: {
                                    limits:
                                        cpu: parameter.cpu
                                    requests:
                                        cpu: parameter.cpu
                                }
                            }
                        }]
                }
                }
            }
        }
        // an extra template
        outputs: service: {
            apiVersion: "v1"
            kind:       "Service"
            spec: {
                selector: {
                    "app.oam.dev/component": context.name
                }
                ports: [
                    {
                        port:       parameter.port
                        targetPort: parameter.port
                    },
                ]
            }
        }
        parameter: {
            image: string
            cmd?: [...string]
            port: *80 | int
            env?: [...{
                name:   string
                value?: string
                valueFrom?: {
                    secretKeyRef: {
                        name: string
                        key:  string
                    }
                }
            }]
            cpu?: string
        }

The user could now declare an Application with it:

apiVersion: core.oam.dev/v1beta1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: webserver-demo
  namespace: default
spec:
  components:
    - name: hello-world
      type: webserver
      properties:
        image: crccheck/hello-world
        port: 8000
        env:
        - name: "foo"
          value: "bar"
        cpu: "100m"

It will generate and manage below API resources in target cluster:

$ kubectl get deployment
NAME             READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
hello-world-v1   1/1     1            1           15s
$ kubectl get svc
NAME                           TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
hello-world-trait-7bdcff98f7   ClusterIP   <your ip>       <none>        8000/TCP   32s

What’s Next

Please check the Learning CUE documentation about why we support CUE as first-class templating solution and more details about using CUE efficiently.