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

Summary

In this chapter, we began to peek into the world of Helm chart development by introducing the Helm chart and chart definition structure. A Helm chart consists of a chart definition (a Chart.yaml file) and template files used for generating Kubernetes resources. A chart definition is used to provide an identity around the chart, including metadata such as the chart name, version, description, and the application version that the chart deploys.

We also introduced an application called Guestbook, and we began writing a Helm chart that will be used to deploy this application. We ran the helm create command to scaffold a new Helm chart, and we updated the Chart.yaml file to better reflect the application that our chart will deploy. In the next chapter, we will return to the Chart.yaml file when we add a dependency for installing Redis, the backend service that our Guestbook frontend relies on.