Zero-Touch Deployments overview

Zero-Touch Deployments (ZTD) is a feature of ZEDEDA Cloud that helps you keep your enterprise’s projects organized and functioning reliably. ZTD enables you to automate policy assignments and application instance deployments to your fleet of edge nodes. By automating these activities, your fleet will behave reliably with less administrative input.

ZTD is facilitated by ZEDEDA's tagging and Project systems. When you onboard a new edge node or add a new application to one of your projects, you'll be prompted to assign tags to it. Likewise, when you create a new deployment in one of your projects, you'll also be prompted to assign tags to it. ZEDEDA Cloud matches the tags on your edge nodes to the tags on your deployments and applications associated with the same project. Matching policies will be applied to matching nodes, and matching applications will be instantiated and deployed on matching nodes.

To change which deployment is applied to one of your edge nodes, or to deploy either additional or different application instances on one of your edge nodes, all you need to do is change the tags on that node to match those on your applications. ZEDEDA Cloud will handle the rest.

ZTD makes sophisticated versioning strategies and rollbacks in your projects easy. For example, you may have two sets of edge nodes in one of your projects. You may want to deploy one application or apply one policy to all of the nodes in one set and another application or policy to all of the nodes in your other set. Or you may want to roll one set back to a previous application or policy version. You can do all of this easily with Zero-Touch Deployments.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with ZEDEDA projects.

GUI operations with ZEDEDA deployments

Create a new deployment

To create a new deployment, you need to create a new project with the Deployment type. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Click on Administration, on the side nav.
2. Select Projects from the menu.
3. Click on the plus icon to add a new project to your enterprise.
4. Fill in the Details form, select the Deployment option form the Type dropdown. Click Next.
5. Fill in the Deployments form. Click Next.
6. Configure the policies for your deployment. Click Next.
7. Review your new project settings. When you are ready, click Add.

Create a new deployment version

Existing deployments cannot be updated. You can, however, create new versions of existing deployments. ZEDEDA Cloud retains up to 100 of your most recent deployments per project.

To update an existing deployment, follow these steps:

1. Select the appropriate project from your Projects page.
2. Click the Deployments tab.
3. Click the Pencil icon.
4. Click Add Deployment.
5. Enter the tag names for your new deployment version.
6. Update your new version's policy configurations.
7. Click Save.

You should see your new deployment version at the top of your project's list of deployments. It will have an incremented version number in the Version column.

Rollback a deployment

You can reactivate any of your stored versions at any time. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Edge Node page and click on your Edge Node.
2. Click on the Basic Info tab.
3. Choose the pencil icon.
4. Change the Deployment Tag Name of the node to match the tag of the deployment version you want to apply.
5. Click Save.

Delete a deployment

ZEDEDA will automatically delete your project's oldest deployment whenever you exceed 100 deployments in that single project. You can also delete a deployment manually:

1. Go to the left panel > Administration > Projects.
2. Check one or more checkboxes to select the deployment you want to delete.
3. Click the ellipses (...).
4. Click Delete Deployment and confirm that you want to Delete at the prompt.

You get a message that deleting a deployment will cause loss of the application data on your edge node as well as the cloud controller. Deleted deployments cannot be restored again from the cloud controller. 

As of ZEDEDA Cloud version 15.5.0, you can add a new deployment from the Administration > Projects > Deployments tab even after you have deleted all your deployments from the project. Prior to this release, it wasn’t possible to create a new deployment from this location after deleting all of them.