Managing Bundles as a Team with Porter
Feb 19, 2020
One tenet of working on a great team, is that no one deploys alone. I may have originally deployed our application, but that doesn’t mean that I am responsible for patching it until the end of time, or until I run away screaming. I am excited to announce that Porter now fully supports teams managing a bundle collaboratively! 🙌
🔷 Sally deploys the application on Tuesday using secrets stored in the team’s Key Vault.
🔷 When a new version of the application comes out on Thursday, Adnan updates the deployed bundle.
🔷 Their manager Qi downloads Porter onto her laptop over the weekend and in minutes is running a custom bundle action to view logs to investigate a bug report.
These seamless handoffs are now possible because of two big efforts: Porter’s new plugin framework and changes to cnab-go supporting generic storage and credential resolution strategies.
Now your team can setup a cloud account, and share a Porter config file that says which plugin to use and how to connect to the account. Porter uses the plugin to resolve credentials against the team’s secret store, such as Azure Key Vault, and stores the bundle instance in cloud storage, like Azure Blob Storage.
This is a big step forward for collaborating on bundles. More importantly it is much more secure. Secrets plugins move the storage of credentials used by your bundles off of laptops and CI machines, back into secure secret stores where they can be managed by the team, encrypted at rest and not left around after the bundle is executed. Even if you are using Porter as a single user, you should move to using a secrets plugin.
With the latest release of Porter, the Azure plugin is installed by default so that people can try it out. Nothing about the plugin framework is specific to Azure, it is just the first plugin we implemented. We would love to see more plugins for other providers! Just like with mixins, anyone can write a plugin, distribute, and list it alongside the porter-authored plugins. Please reach out to us on the #porter Slack if you are interested in making a plugin.
😎 Already using Porter? Install the latest release, give the plugins tutorial a try and let us know what you think!
🎉 Ready to try Porter for the first time? Install, head over to the quickstart and then check out our learning page for a high level overview of CNAB, demos of bundles in action and more.
