Overview of component life cycle

Stage 1: Pushing a component to the component artifact repository

MACH composer is primarily used to deploy components in an individual site, and provide it with the right context (settings, endpoints, etc.).

Components themselves are responsible for publishing their own artifacts and terraform code into an artifact repository (which can be a simple S3 bucket), which usually is implemented by configuring a CI/CD pipeline that manages that automatically.

An artifact is usually a zip file containing a serverless function, i.e. my-component-vXYZ.zip. These can be conveniently generated using the serverless framework, using sls package, but can also be built using a different process. Next to serverless functions, it is increasingly common to deploy Docker containers through MACH composer, using the serverless container hosting options in cloud providers (i.e. AWS Fargate).

A component always contains a Terraform module

Next to the component publishing its artifact into an artifact repository, it should also provide the necessary terraform resources for the component. Usually, components have a /terraform directory in the root of the component, containing the Terraform module, which is the entrypoint for MACH Composer. And MACH composer in turn leverages Terraform's 'modules sources' functionality to 'pull together' different modules from different Git repositories.

sequenceDiagram participant D as Developer participant S as SCM participant CI as CI/CD participant C as Artifact Repository D->>S: Merges new code S->>CI: run build and tests opt if master branch CI->>C: Push artifact to component artifact repository (S3, for example) end

MACH composer ☁️ provides a component registry API

To improve the stability of your MACH composer pipelines, it is often not reliable to rely on updating component versions based on GitHub commits. In order to improve this, we are introducing a Component Registry as part of MACH composer ☁️.

Stage 2: MACH composer deployment

MACH composer itself is primarily a code generator that generates the required Terraform code per site in the YAML configuration. Optionally (though recommended) MACH composer decrypts the YAML file through SOPS.

sequenceDiagram participant D as Developer participant M as MACH composer participant S as SOPS participant T as Terraform participant SC as component SCM participant C as Artifact Repository participant MACH as MACH services participant Cloud as Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) D->>M: executes mach apply opt if encrypted with SOPS S->>Cloud: fetch encryption key S->>M: decrypt & return yaml configuration end loop per site configuration M->>M: generates Terraform code based on YAML M->>T: execute Terraform code loop per component SC->>T: fetch terraform module from SCM C->> T: fetch component end T->>MACH: create/configure MACH resources T->>Cloud: create/configure cloud resources T->>Cloud: deploy components (i.e. Lambda zipfiles) end

Running MACH composer in CI/CD is a best practice

For production deployments we recommend running MACH composer in a CI/CD pipeline. This because running it requires access to sensitive resources and should be secured properly, as well as providing a good audit-trail about who deployed what at which time.