Container Registry Updates in VMware Spring Cloud® Data Flow for Kubernetes

This topic describes how to use the new Pro server feature for managing container image versions for stream and task apps used with VMware Spring Cloud® Data Flow for Kubernetes (SCDF for Kubernetes).

New Application Version Alerts and Continuous Delivery

The SCDF Pro dashboard can register applications by automatically retrieving the available tags from container images in the backing Docker registry. With this automation in place, users can update existing Streams with these new versions of the registered applications.

Once an application’s container image is registered in SCDF’s application registry, the server retrieves the latest available tags associated with the image by using the Docker registry REST API.

If the registry that is being used requires authentication, please see the Managing Registry Authentication section.

The current implementation checks for new tags available above (that is, more recent than) the current default version. For instance, if you have an app registered with a tag of version 2.0.0, all the versions above 2.0.0 are retrieved (if available) and listed in the SCDF Dashboard as availabletags.

You can update the registered container images from the Applications page. You can check for:

  • updates on all the registered applications
  • updates on the applications that are used by the Streams
  • updates on the applications that are used by the Tasks

Check for updates

Since this operation involves getting the tags of all the corresponding images, it may take a few seconds to minutes depending on how many applications you have registered.

Once the updates are available, the corresponding application is updated with the i icon to alert that there are new versions available. For instance, in the following screenshot, you can see that the application filter has new versions available.

Applications List

Once the application versions are available, you can either:

  • Register the available version(s) with SCDF by choosing them individually
  • For stream applications, you can update the streams with the new versions of the applications.

Bulk Stream Updates

The following example shows how to perform a Stream update:

Go to Streams list page:

Streams List

Click UPDATE VERSION(S)

After clicking UPDATE VERSION(S), all the applications that are used by the Streams are updated with any of the available versions, and the following form is shown with the list of applications that have new versions available.

Streams Update Apps List

Here you can choose the applications you would like to update and proceed by clicking NEXT.

Streams Update Apps Select

For each selected application, you can see the list of available versions.

Note that the list of available versions shown here are the net-new versions for the same application.

You can also choose a version to be the default version for the application in SCDF’s application registry Going forward, this new version is used as the default version for stream deployments.

Streams Update Apps Version Select

You can select the version for all the other applications, as follows:

Streams Update Another App Version Select

Once the new versions are selected for the applications, you can:

  1. Register the newly selected version of each of the application that is part of the stream
  2. Mark the selected version as the default version (if preferred)
  3. Run the Stream update operation to update the applications’ version to the selected version

Streams Update Operations List

Streams Update Operations List

Streams Update Result

Single Stream Update

If you prefer to update a single Stream by only choosing the specific versions of the applications associated with that Stream, then you can perform a single Stream update by just setting the application versions as below:

Single Stream Selection

Once the Stream is selected, you can choose the application versions and update:

Single Stream Selection Version

Individual Application Update

You can also update the versions of the individual applications.

Go to the Applications page:

Applications List

Select the ellipsis icon available to the left of the individual application and click Manage Version, as follows:

Applications List Manage Version

You see a form where you can select the latest available versions and mark them to be registered with SCDF.

Note that you can register multiple versions this way.

Application Manage Version

Application Manage Version Select

You also have an option to mark any of the currently selected versions as the default version for the application and proceed with the registration, as follows:

Application Make Default

Application Register

Managing Registry Authentication

The credentials used in the REST request to connect to the container registry are, by default, obtained from the respective target platform account’s imagePullSecret.

If you have already configured the imagePullSecret (of type .dockerconfigjson for the container registry) to SCDF and Skipper deployment accounts, as documented in SCDF installation documentation,the same secret is used to connect to the container registry to retrieve the latest tags of the registered applications.

If you use container images from multiple container registries (apart from the one configured through the default imagePullSecret), you can add the container registry credentials to SCDF’s container registry configure. See Features Guide page for more detail.