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Documentation

Introduction
SmoothGlue Run Basic contains our core platform tools, as well as the SmoothGlue Console for administration, and continuous delivery tooling so you can install and run your own applications.

Installation

You can launch a free version of our "Basic" SmoothGlue Run platform straight from the AWS Marketplace.
  • In the AWS EC2 console, navigate to Images then Image Catalog
  • In the AWS Marketplace AMIs tab, search for smoothglue, select it, then click Launch instance with AMI

Launching from the Marketplace

Note:

The Basic tier does not have additional costs beyond the charges associated with the Amazon EC2 instance.

Provide Instance Details

  • Follow the wizard to launch your instance, paying attention to the instance size selected
  • We recommend deploying SmoothGlue Run Basic into a private subnet and exposing it later via load balancing if public access is required.
  • Ensure the security groups allow access from the IPs/subnets you will be accessing from
  • Click Launch instance and monitor the instance rollout via the console.

Note:

Post AWS initialization, SmoothGlue Run Basic will be available from your browser in approximately 15 minutes, depending on the instance size selected.

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Getting Started

  • To access the web console, direct your browser to the IP address of the private IP address issued by EC2 for this instance (e.g. https://10.123.45.67)

Note:

SmoothGlue Run Basic generates and uses self-signed TLS certificates by default so you will need to accept any browser warnings that appear

Single Sign-On

  • The default username is admin and default password is the password
  • Upon first login, you will be required to change your password. This account will give you access via SSO to the entire platform from here on.
  • Then proceed to Sign in.
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    After loading the site and accepting any certificate warnings, you’ll see the SmoothGlue Console sign in screen, click Sign in
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Platform Administration

As a platform administrator, the SmoothGlue Console allows you to provision teams and users within the platform, manage their permissions, and access a variety of supporting platform tools already pre-installed.

Organizations

When you first log in, you’ll be in the Platform Administrator role of Console. This panel shows the Organizations within your installation. Organizations are a concept to help you group together multiple projects, users and deployments under one umbrella.
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Users

Users within SmoothGlue are automatically provisioned with accounts via SSO and permissioned accordingly based on their role within the platform or organization.
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There are 4 types of users:
  • Platform Admin
    The Platform Admin role is designed to enable system admins, IT help desk representatives, or other roles depending on the company structure to perform user management tasks from a single place
  • Organization Admin
    The Organization Admin role is designed for individuals in positions such as project managers, engineering managers, technical leaders, or other roles responsible for administering software development teams.
  • Organization Privileged
    The Organization Privileged role is available to empower users with additional permissions beyond that of Organization Member. This functionality depends on the particular modules installed.
  • Organization Member
    The Organization Member role is designed for application developers and any software development team member who needs access to tools on the SmoothGlue platform.

Tools

SmoothGlue Run Basic comes equipped with a range of tools pre-installed that work to optimize and secure the platform and provide key functionality for running a DevSecOps platform.
At a high level, here’s what is installed with a web UI you can explore:
Behind the scenes are additional tools that provide even more capabilities:

Grafana Dashboards

Every tool within SmoothGlue Run is automatically configured with Single Sign-On so you can click and explore each of them in turn. If you click the tile for Grafana and log in, you can also see a range of pre-configured dashboards showing every detail you could ever want about the metrics being collected across the platform.
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Developer Workflow

One of the key benefits of SmoothGlue Console is that the day-to-day usage of the platform by developers and others doesn’t require you to understand all of the platform underpinnings.
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    Click your username in the top-right corner and select "User panel" to switch out of the Administrator mode.

Dashboard

The view you start with as a user is your Dashboard. This shows the recently used projects your user has interacted with. If you’re a member of multiple Organizations, they’re accessible from the dropdown at the top of the page. Click Go to projects to set one up.
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Tools

Clicking the Tools icon in the left-hand navigation brings the user to the Tools page. This page presents the user with the tools they have access to in the platform. For SmoothGlue run basic, the only user-level tool available is Argo CD.
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Projects

Projects are the main place where work gets done in SmoothGlue. If you have the SmoothGlue Build module, you can set up and access to Git repositories, ticketing, chat, wikis. In Run, you’ll mostly be focused on deploying an application.
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Let's get started!

Click Add new project and proceed through the wizard.
  • A window will pop up saying "New Project."
  • Select Quick Set Up and click Next
  • On the following window, type in a name for your project
  • Click Next and Set Up Project on the following window.
  • Your project should now be launched and visible on the page.
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  4. Now your project shows up in the list of projects.

Sample Application

  • Within your new project click on the arrow to the right, then select the Deployments Tab.
  • Click the Add Deployment button to start the wizard
  • Click on Deploy an Application and select Example Application, then click Next
  • Enter the name for your application and click Submit
  • Refresh your page and you will see ArgoCD spin up and deploy the example application.

Note:

Other fields are not configurable at this time.

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  4. You can select the application and on the right hand side view details of the sync status.
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    Clicking the arrow on the right will take you to the ArgoCD view with even more details.
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  7. After SmoothGlue Run has deployed your application, you’ll see a new "Virtual Services" set of tiles. Clicking the tile for your application will take you to the UI for the deployed example application.

Your own applications

While SmoothGlue Run Basic only offers the ability to automatically deploy a single example application, if you know how to use Kubernetes, you can easily install whatever you like.
The automation within Console sets up a few key pieces of functionality automatically:
  • A Kubernetes Namespace to hold your deployed resources
  • An ArgoCD Project which holds your application.
  • An ArgoCD Kustomize Application which performs the GitOps deployment of the application. To deploy your own, you’ll need manifests in a publicly accessible Git repository. Follow the ArgoCD documentation to configure it to connect to your manifests.
  • An Istio VirtualService to route traffic to your application via the existing ingress

To get access to the Kubernetes control plane in order to deploy your application, you can SSH into your instance (ssh rocky@10.123.45.67), and execute kubectl commands directly.

Feel free to poke around and copy the manifests deployed by SmoothGlue to set up your own, or reach out to support@smoothglue.com and we’d love to hear your use case as we expand the UX to offer more customization and deployment scenarios.