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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Creating a Guestbook Helm chart

In this section, we will create a Helm chart to deploy the Guestbook application. The final chart has been published under the helm-charts/charts/guestbook folder of the Packt repository. Feel free to reference this location as you follow along with the examples.

We will begin development by first scaffolding the Guestbook Helm chart to create the chart's initial file structure.

Scaffolding the initial file structure

As you may recall from Chapter 4, Understanding Helm Charts, Helm charts must follow a particular file structure in order to be considered valid. Namely, a chart must contain the following required files:

  • Chart.yaml: Used to define chart metadata
  • values.yaml: Used to define default chart values
  • templates/: Used to define chart templates and Kubernetes resources to be created

We provided a list of each of the possible files a chart can contain in Chapter 4, Understanding Helm Charts, but the three preceding...