The Age of Cloud-native: Building Efficient CI Pipeline from Jenkins to Argo Workflows

By Jing Cai

Argo Workflows

Argo Workflows [1] is an open-source, cloud-native workflow engine that orchestrates jobs on Kubernetes. It simplifies the automation and management of complex workflows on Kubernetes, making it suitable for various scenarios, including scheduled tasks, machine learning, ETL and data analysis, model training, data flow pipelines, and CI/CD.

While Kubernetes Jobs can execute basic tasks, they lack the ability to define step dependencies and sequences. They also lack workflow templates, visual interfaces, and workflow-level error handling. As a result, Kubernetes Jobs are not suitable for business scenarios such as batch processing, data processing, scientific computing, and continuous integration.

As a CNCF graduate project, Argo Workflows has been widely used in various scenarios, with continuous integration (CI) being a key application area.

CI and Jenkins

Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) play a crucial role in the software development lifecycle, enabling teams to develop applications through an agile process and improve the quality of the applications they build. Continuous integration is an automated process that helps developers submit code changes to the master branch more frequently and reliably, after undergoing testing, building, and other steps.

As the most popular solution in the CI/CD field, Jenkins boasts several advantages, including being free and open-source, offering a rich set of plugins, and having a mature community. However, it still faces some challenges, particularly in today's cloud-native landscape.

• Non-Kubernetes native;
• With the increase of pipeline and plug-ins, Jenkins will face performance bottlenecks;
• The auto-scaling capability is insufficient, the concurrency is insufficient, the running time is long, and free computing increases costs;
• In terms of maintenance costs, a rich plug-in ecosystem can also lead to issues such as incompatible plug-in versions, untimely updates, or security vulnerabilities. Therefore, managing plug-in updates and permissions is an ongoing challenge;
• Defects in the project isolation and permission allocation scheme.

Comparison between Argo Workflows and Jenkins

Compared to Jenkins, Argo Workflows offers several advantages. Built on Kubernetes, Argo Workflows inherits its benefits, including auto-scaling and concurrency capabilities. This enables it to handle large-scale pipelines with faster execution speeds and lower costs, allowing developers to focus on business functionality and deliver value to customers. Additionally, Argo Workflows seamlessly integrates with Argo CD, Argo Rollout, and Argo Event, providing more powerful capabilities for scenarios like CI. With Argo Workflows, you can build a more cloud-native, scalable, efficient, and cost-effective CI pipeline.

The comparison is as follows:

	Argo Workflows	Jenkins
Kubernetes-native	It is Kubernetes-native, so it also has the container management advantages of Kubernetes, such as: • Automatic recovery after container failure • Support for auto-scaling • Supports for RBAC and the integrated SSO capability of Argo to easily implement multi-tenancy isolation for enterprises	Non-Kubernetes native
Auto-scaling, concurrency, and performance	• Argo is used to handle large-scale pipelines and supports auto-scaling. • Concurrency makes running faster and more efficient.	• Jenkins is more suitable for small-scale scenarios, and its performance will decrease when it is required to process a large number of pipelines. The auto-scaling capability is poor. • Insufficient concurrency and long running time.
Cost	• The auto-scaling capability helps minimize costs. • Its native support for spot nodes helps reduce costs.	• Its free computing will increase costs.
Community and ecosystem	The Argo community continues to grow and seamlessly integrates with its ecological Argo CD, Argo Rollout, and Argo Event. This enables it to provide more powerful capabilities for scenarios such as CI.	The Jenkins community is mature and has abundant resources. A large number of plug-ins reduce the use threshold. However, over time, plug-in updates and permission management greatly increase O&M costs, making developers focus more on maintaining plug-ins instead of business functions and the value for customers.

CI Pipeline Based on ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows

ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows

As a fully managed Argo Workflows service that complies with community specifications, ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows [2] is designed to handle large-scale computing-intensive jobs. It integrates with Alibaba Cloud Elastic Container Instance (ECI) to implement auto-scaling, ultrahigh elasticity, and on-demand scaling to minimize costs, and costs can be reduced by 80% with the preemptible spot ECI [3].

Overview of CI Pipeline

To build a CI pipeline based on an ACK One Serverless Argo workflow cluster, BuildKit [4] is used to build and push container images. In addition, BuildKit Cache is used to [5] accelerate image building, and NAS is used to store Go mod cache to accelerate go test and go build, which greatly accelerates the CI pipeline process.

The ClusterWorkflowTemplate of the implemented CI Pipeline is predefined in a workflow cluster (named ci-go-v1), which mainly consists of three steps:

Git Clone & Checkout: Clone the Git repository and check out the Git repository to the destination branch. Obtain the commit ID.
Run Go Test: Use parameters to control whether to perform this step and use NAS to store Go mod cache for acceleration.
Build & Push Image:

Use BuildKit to build and push container images, and use caches of the registry type in BuildKit Cache to accelerate image building.
By default, the image tag is in the {container_tag}-{commit_id} format. You can specify whether to append the commit ID to the image tag when you submit the pipeline.
During image pushing, the latest version of the image is pushed to overwrite the current version.

You can perform the following steps to complete the running of the CI Pipeline. For more information, please refer to the best practice [6]:

Prepare credentials in the workflow cluster to access the Container Registry Enterprise Edition instance and mount the NAS volume to the workflow cluster
Launch a pipeline based on the predefined template to run a CI Pipeline

Predefine the CI Pipeline Template

By default, workflow clusters provide a predefined ClusterWorkflowTemplate named ci-go-v1, and the YAML is as follows. For more information about the parameters, see the best practice [6]:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterWorkflowTemplate
metadata:
  name: ci-go-v1
spec:
  entrypoint: main
  volumes:
  - name: run-test
    emptyDir: {}
  - name: workdir
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: pvc-nas
  - name: docker-config
    secret:
      secretName: docker-config
  arguments:
    parameters:
    - name: repo_url
      value: ""
    - name: repo_name
      value: ""
    - name: target_branch
      value: "main"
    - name: container_image
      value: ""
    - name: container_tag
      value: "v1.0.0"
    - name: dockerfile
      value: "./Dockerfile"
    - name: enable_suffix_commitid
      value: "true"
    - name: enable_test
      value: "true"
  templates:
    - name: main
      dag:
        tasks:
          - name: git-checkout-pr
            inline:
              container:
                image: alpine:latest
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - |
                    set -eu

                    apk --update add git

                    cd /workdir
                    echo "Start to Clone "{{workflow.parameters.repo_url}}
                    git -C "{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}" pull || git clone {{workflow.parameters.repo_url}} 
                    cd {{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}

                    echo "Start to Checkout target branch" {{workflow.parameters.target_branch}}
                    git checkout {{workflow.parameters.target_branch}}

                    echo "Get commit id" 
                    git rev-parse --short origin/{{workflow.parameters.target_branch}} > /workdir/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}-commitid.txt
                    commitId=$(cat /workdir/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}-commitid.txt)
                    echo "Commit id is got: "$commitId

                    echo "Git Clone and Checkout Complete."
                volumeMounts:
                - name: "workdir"
                  mountPath: /workdir
                resources:
                  requests:
                    memory: 1Gi
                    cpu: 1
                activeDeadlineSeconds: 1200
          - name: run-test
            when: "{{workflow.parameters.enable_test}} == true"
            inline: 
              container:
                image: golang:1.22-alpine
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - |
                    set -eu

                    if [ ! -d "/workdir/pkg/mod" ]; then
                      mkdir -p /workdir/pkg/mod
                      echo "GOMODCACHE Directory /pkg/mod is created"
                    fi

                    export GOMODCACHE=/workdir/pkg/mod

                    cp -R /workdir/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}} /test/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}} 
                    echo "Start Go Test..."

                    cd /test/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}
                    go test -v ./...

                    echo "Go Test Complete."
                volumeMounts:
                - name: "workdir"
                  mountPath: /workdir
                - name: run-test
                  mountPath: /test
                resources:
                  requests:
                    memory: 4Gi
                    cpu: 2
              activeDeadlineSeconds: 1200
            depends: git-checkout-pr    
          - name: build-push-image
            inline: 
              container:
                image: moby/buildkit:v0.13.0-rootless
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - |         
                    set -eu

                    tag={{workflow.parameters.container_tag}}
                    if [ {{workflow.parameters.enable_suffix_commitid}} == "true" ]
                    then
                      commitId=$(cat /workdir/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}-commitid.txt)
                      tag={{workflow.parameters.container_tag}}-$commitId
                    fi

                    echo "Image Tag is: "$tag
                    echo "Start to Build And Push Container Image"

                    cd /workdir/{{workflow.parameters.repo_name}}

                    buildctl-daemonless.sh build \
                    --frontend \
                    dockerfile.v0 \
                    --local \
                    context=. \
                    --local \
                    dockerfile=. \
                    --opt filename={{workflow.parameters.dockerfile}} \
                    build-arg:GOPROXY=http://goproxy.cn,direct \
                    --output \
                    type=image,\"name={{workflow.parameters.container_image}}:${tag},{{workflow.parameters.container_image}}:latest\",push=true,registry.insecure=true \
                    --export-cache mode=max,type=registry,ref={{workflow.parameters.container_image}}:buildcache \
                    --import-cache type=registry,ref={{workflow.parameters.container_image}}:buildcache

                    echo "Build And Push Container Image {{workflow.parameters.container_image}}:${tag} and {{workflow.parameters.container_image}}:latest Complete."
                env:
                  - name: BUILDKITD_FLAGS
                    value: --oci-worker-no-process-sandbox
                  - name: DOCKER_CONFIG
                    value: /.docker
                volumeMounts:
                  - name: workdir
                    mountPath: /workdir
                  - name: docker-config
                    mountPath: /.docker
                securityContext:
                  seccompProfile:
                    type: Unconfined
                  runAsUser: 1000
                  runAsGroup: 1000
                resources:
                  requests:
                    memory: 4Gi
                    cpu: 2
              activeDeadlineSeconds: 1200
            depends: run-test

Run CI Pipeline on the Console

Log on to the ACK One console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Workflow Cluster [7]
On the Workflow Cluster page, click the Basic Information tab. In the Common Operations section, click Workflow Console (Argo) and go to the page.
In the Argo workbench, click Cluster Workflow Templates in the left-side navigation pane and click the predefined template named ci-go-v1 to go to the details page.
On the template details page, click + SUBMIT in the upper-right corner. In the panel that appears, configure the parameters and click + SUBMIT.

Parameter descriptions:

Parameter	Description	Parameter value
repo_url	The URL of the Git repository.	https://github.com/ivan-cai/echo-server.git
repo_name	The name of the repository.	echo-server
target_branch	The destination branch of the repository.	Default value: main.
container_image	The image to be built.	test-registry.cn-hongkong.cr.aliyuncs.com/acs/echo-server
container_tag	The image tag.	Default: v1.0.0.
dockerfile	The directory and name of the Dockerfile. Specify the relative path in the root directory.	Default: ./Dockerfile.
enable_suffix_commitid	Specify whether to append the commit ID to the image tag.	true/false (default value: true).
enable_test	Specify whether to run the Go Test step.	true/false (default value: true).

After you complete the configuration, you can view the status of the pipeline on the Workflows details page of the Argo UI as follows:

Summary

As a fully managed Argo Workflows service, ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows can help you implement larger-scale, faster, and lower-cost CI pipelines. With event-driven architectures such as ACK One GitOps 8 and Argo Event, you can build complete automated CI/CD pipelines.

References

[1] Argo Workflows
https://argoproj.github.io/argo-workflows/
[2] ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ack/distributed-cloud-container-platform-for-kubernetes/user-guide/overview-12
[3] Preemptible ECI
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/eci/use-cases/run-jobs-on-a-preemptible-instance
[4] BuildKit
https://github.com/moby/buildkit
[5] BuildKit Cache
https://github.com/moby/buildkit?tab=readme-ov-file#cache
[6] Best Practices
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ack/distributed-cloud-container-platform-for-kubernetes/use-cases/building-a-ci-pipeline-of-golang-project-based-on-workflow-cluster
[7] ACK One Workflow Cluster Console
https://account.aliyun.com/login/login.htm?oauth_callback=https%3A%2F%2Fcs.console.aliyun.com%2Fone%3Fspm%3Da2c4g.11186623.0.0.555018e1SiD2lC#/argowf/cluster/detail
[8] ACK One GitOps
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ack/distributed-cloud-container-platform-for-kubernetes/user-guide/gitops-overview

Community

The Age of Cloud-native: Building Efficient CI Pipeline from Jenkins to Argo Workflows

Argo Workflows

CI and Jenkins

Comparison between Argo Workflows and Jenkins

CI Pipeline Based on ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows

ACK One Serverless Argo Workflows

Overview of CI Pipeline

Predefine the CI Pipeline Template

Run CI Pipeline on the Console

Summary

References

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