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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Improving the Guestbook Helm chart

The chart created in the previous section was able to successfully deploy the Guestbook application. However, as is the case with any type of software, the Helm chart can always be improved. In this section, we will focus on the following two features that will improve the guestbook chart:

  • Life cycle hooks to back up and restore the Redis database
  • Input validation to ensure only valid values are provided

Let's focus first on adding life cycle hooks.

Creating pre-upgrade and pre-rollback life cycle hooks

In this section, we will create two life cycle hooks, as follows:

  1. The first hook will occur in the pre-upgrade life cycle phase. This phase takes place immediately after the helm upgrade command is run, but before any Kubernetes resources become modified. This hook will be used to take a data snapshot of the Redis database before performing the upgrade, ensuring that the database is backed up in case the upgrade...