Cloud platform user guide

Who is this user guide for?

This user guide is for service teams with applications deployed, or intending to deploy, to the Ministry of Justice Cloud Platform. The platform manages the infrastructure that your application runs on and provides tooling for teams to deploy and manage their applications on that infrastructure.

Quickstart

• Overview of the Cloud Platform
• Deploy your first Hello World application

How-to guides

• How to use kubectl to connect to the cluster
• Creating a Cloud Platform Environment
• Creating an ECR repository for your docker images
• Creating a Route 53 Hosted Zone for your DNS records
• Adding AWS resources to your environment
• How do I run Rails database migrations?
• Removing an unneeded namespace

Concepts

• Kubernetes
• Deploying to the Cloud Platform
• Migrate from Template Deploy
• OFFICIAL SENSITIVE - can my service be hosted on the Cloud Platform?

Tutorials

• Deploying a Hello World application
• Deploying a multi-container application to the Cloud Platform

Deploying with Helm and CircleCI

• Prerequisite for Live-1 deployment
• Continuous Deployment of an application using CircleCI and Helm
• Deploying an application to the Cloud Platform with Helm

Monitoring applications

• Using the Cloud Platform Prometheus, AlertManager and Grafana
• Getting application metrics into Prometheus
• Creating your own custom alerts
• Creating Pingdom checks
• Using the CloudWatch data source in Grafana

Application logging

• Application Log Collection and Storage
• Accessing Application Log Data

Other topics

• Adding a secret to an application
• Cloud Platform Support
• Zero Downtime Deployments
• Using a custom domain
• Creating alerts for RDS
• Accessing your RDS database
• RDS Snapshots
• Setup Postgres container
• Time Zone Cronjobs
• How to decommission unused template deploy services
• Git-Crypt
• Kubernetes Cronjobs
• IP Filtering
• Applying a Maintenance Page
• Kubectl quick reference
• StatefulSets (Pods with Persistent Volumes)
• Troubleshooting guide
• Creating a Route 53 Hosted Zone
• Migrating an RDS instance
• SSL connections with RDS
• Secrets overview
• ModSecurity - Web Application Firewall
• Network Policies
• Persistent-Volume encryption and snapshot
• Migrating an S3 bucket
• Kibana Circleci Monitoring Dashboards
• Namespace/Container Resource Limits
• Removing Deprecated APIs for Kubernetes version 1.16
• Checking the GitHub groups in your ID token

Reference

• Cloud Platform Operational Processes
• Cloud Platform Support
• Kubernetes resources

Getting help

• Ask Cloud Platform

Adding to the guide

If there’s something missing, please either let us know and we’ll add a new article, or if you’re comfortable writing one yourself, PRs will be gratefully received. Details on how to get in touch are in the “Getting Help” section above, and the “GithHub” link at the top right of this page will take you to the repository for this guide.