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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Summary

A Helm chart is a set of files, written primarily in the YAML format, that follows a certain file structure. The Chart.yaml file is used to set chart metadata and declare dependencies. The templates/ directory is used to contain Kubernetes YAML resources that are Go-templated, allowing them to be dynamically generated. Kubernetes resources defined under the templates/ directory can also contain certain hooks to configure stages in an application's life cycle. To provide documentation to users, charts can contain the README.md and templates/NOTES.txt files and can also contain the LICENSE file to declare chart usage and distribution rights. Finally, charts can contain a .helmignore file, which is used to omit declared files from the final packaged product.

In this chapter, you learned about the structure of a Helm chart and how to configure key chart components. With the knowledge from this chapter under your belt, you now have an understanding of the basic concepts...