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Version: 1.10.0

Transfer of an Epinio Application to another cluster

Epinio provides the ability to export all parts of a running application and then use these to run the application in a different cluster.

Note however that the above only applies to the core application itself, and not to configurations and services it may need / be bound to in the origin cluster.

Export​

Exporting an application APP is trivially done by running the command

epinio app export APP /path/to/a/directory/of/your/choice/

After the command has run the chosen directory contains the 3 parts of the application needed to run it elsewhere, namely:

  • app-image.tar. The application's runtime image as generated by the staging process and saved into a tar archive as generated by docker save.

  • app-chart.tar.gz. The application chart used to deploy the application.

  • values.yaml. The configuration of the application chart. This part references the application image. Beware, this reference is only valid for the origin cluster.

Import​

To import APP into a new cluster

  1. Run docker load app-image.tar to import the image and its layers into the local docker setup. The output will contain a line referencing the Loaded image ID. This is the hash of the loaded image and needed in the next step.

    Beware. Do not use docker import, nor docker image import for this. While these commands do store the image into the local docker similar to load they do not preserve the layering, nor the Entrypoint information coming with these. It is the latter which makes the result unusable for our purposes.

  2. Run docker tag HASH REGISTRY/ORG/NAME:TAG where HASH is the hash of the image as reported by the previous step. REGISTRY, etc. are mostly arbitrary values chosen by the importer. The REGISTRY is optional, i.e. would default to dockerhub. If set it has to refer to an actual registry the destination cluster is able to pull from.

  3. Run docker push REGISTRY/ORG/NAME:TAG to save the image to the chosen registry. Without this step the image would only exist locally and could not be pulled later.

  4. Edit the imageURL field in the file values.yaml to replace the existing image reference, valid only for the origin cluster, with REGISTRY/ORG/NAME:TAG.

  5. Edit the domain/id information of the routes section of values.yaml to prevent clashes with the instance of APP running on the origin cluster. This will of course not be necessary if APP was not kept running on the origin cluster.

  6. Possibly edit the appName field in values.yaml.

  7. Run helm upgrade --install NAME app-chart.tar.gz --values values.yaml to deploy the modified application on the destination cluster under an arbitrarily chosen release name.