Book Image

Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure - Second Edition

By : Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz
Book Image

Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure - Second Edition

By: Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz

Overview of this book

From managing versioning efficiently to improving security and portability, technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker have greatly helped cloud deployments and application development. Starting with an introduction to Docker, Kubernetes, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), this book will guide you through deploying an AKS cluster in different ways. You’ll then explore the Azure portal by deploying a sample guestbook application on AKS and installing complex Kubernetes apps using Helm. With the help of real-world examples, you'll also get to grips with scaling your application and cluster. As you advance, you'll understand how to overcome common challenges in AKS and secure your application with HTTPS and Azure AD (Active Directory). Finally, you’ll explore serverless functions such as HTTP triggered Azure functions and queue triggered functions. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you’ll be well-versed with the fundamentals of Azure Kubernetes Service and be able to deploy containerized workloads on Microsoft Azure with minimal management overhead.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
4
Section 2: Deploying on AKS
10
Section 3: Leveraging advanced Azure PaaS services
15
Index

Installing complex Kubernetes applications using Helm

In the previous section, we used static YAML files to deploy our application. When deploying more complicated applications, across multiple environments (such as dev/test/prod), it can become cumbersome to manually edit YAML files for each environment. This is where the Helm tool comes in.

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. Helm helps you deploy, update, and manage Kubernetes applications at scale. For this, you write something called Helm Charts.

You can think of Helm Charts as parameterized Kubernetes YAML files. If you think about the Kubernetes YAML files we wrote in the previous section, those files were static. You would need to go into the files and edit them to make changes.

Helm charts allow you to write YAML files with certain parameters in them, which you can dynamically set. This setting of the parameters can be done through a values file or as a command-line variable when you deploy the chart.

Finally...