Book Image

Managing Kubernetes Resources Using Helm - Second Edition

By : Andrew Block, Austin Dewey
Book Image

Managing Kubernetes Resources Using Helm - Second Edition

By: Andrew Block, Austin Dewey

Overview of this book

Containerization is one of the best ways to implement DevOps, and learning how to execute it effectively is an essential part of a developer’s skillset. Kubernetes is the current industry standard for container orchestration. This book will help you discover the efficiency of managing applications running on Kubernetes with Helm. Starting with a brief introduction to Helm and its impact on users working with containers and Kubernetes, you’ll delve into the primitives of Helm charts and their architecture and use cases. From there, you’ll understand how to write Helm charts in order to automate application deployment on Kubernetes and work your way toward more advanced strategies. These enterprise-ready patterns are focused on concepts beyond the basics so that you can use Helm optimally, looking at topics related to automation, application development, delivery, lifecycle management, and security. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to leverage Helm to build, deploy, and manage applications on Kubernetes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction and Setup
5
Part 2: Helm Chart Development
12
Part 3: Advanced Deployment Patterns

Using Helm to manage operators, CRDs, and CRs

In this chapter, we installed the Guestbook operator and CRD by using the Makefile instance generated by operator-sdk. Then, we installed a Guestbook CR using kubectl apply. While this is an acceptable way of creating these resources, we could also install the operator, CRD, and CR by using Helm charts to provide a more repeatable solution for installing and managing an operator.

Helm allows you to create CRDs by adding them to a directory called crds/ in your Helm chart. Helm creates CRDs before any of the other resources defined under the templates/ folder, making it simpler to install applications such as operators that depend on CRDs.

The following file structure depicts a Helm chart that could be used to install the Guestbook operator:

guestbook-operator/
  Chart.yaml
  crds/
    guestbooks_crd.yaml
  templates/
    deployment.yaml
    ...