Book Image

Learn Helm

By : Andrew Block, Austin Dewey
Book Image

Learn Helm

By: Andrew Block, Austin Dewey

Overview of this book

Containerization is currently known to be one of the best ways to implement DevOps. While Docker introduced containers and changed the DevOps era, Google developed an extensive container orchestration system, Kubernetes, which is now considered the frontrunner in container orchestration. With the help of this book, you’ll explore the efficiency of managing applications running on Kubernetes using Helm. Starting with a short introduction to Helm and how it can benefit the entire container environment, you’ll then delve into the architectural aspects, in addition to learning about Helm charts and its use cases. You’ll understand how to write Helm charts in order to automate application deployment on Kubernetes. Focused on providing enterprise-ready patterns relating to Helm and automation, the book covers best practices for application development, delivery, and lifecycle management with Helm. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you will have learned how to leverage Helm to develop an enterprise pattern for application delivery.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction and Setup
5
Section 2: Helm Chart Development
9
Section 3: Adanced Deployment Patterns
14
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Using Helm to manage Operators and CRs

In the previous section, you installed the Guestbook Operator by first creating the CRD that is found underneath the guestbook-operator/deploy/crds/ folder. Next, you created the operator resources contained underneath the guestbook-operator/deploy/ folder. Finally, you created the CR to deploy the Guestbook application. Each of these tasks was performed by using the Kubectl CLI, but this instead can also be accomplished using Helm charts to provide a more flexible and repeatable solution toward installing and managing an operator.

Helm allows you to provide a special directory called crds/ inside your Helm chart, which is used to create CRDs whenever the chart is installed. 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 the presence of CRDs.

The following file structure depicts a Helm chart that could be used to install the...