If you've worked your way through the hello-k8s example, you now know everything you need to know to deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters using declarative YAML manifests. But there's a lot of repetition in these files: for example, you've repeated the name demo, the label selector app: demo, and the port 8888 several times.
Shouldn't you be able to just specify those values once, and then reference them wherever they occur through the Kubernetes manifests?
For example, it would be great to be able to define variables called something like container.name and container.port, and then use them wherever they're needed in the YAML files. Then, if you needed to change the name of the app or the port number it listens on, you'd only have to change them in one place, and all the manifests would be updated automatically.
Fortunately, there's a tool for that, and in this example we'll show you a little of what it can do.
One popular package manager for Kubernetes is called Helm, and it works just the way we've described. You can use the helm command-line tool to install and configure applications (your own or anyone else's), and you can create packages called Helm charts, which completely specify the resources needed to run the application, its dependencies, and its configurable settings.
Helm is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation family of projects, which reflects its stability and widespread adoption.
When you install a Helm chart, Kubernetes itself will locate and download the binary container image from the place you specified. In fact, a Helm chart is really just a convenient wrapper around Kubernetes YAML manifests.
Follow the installation instructions at this site for your operating system:
https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/
Once you have Helm installed, you will need to create some Kubernetes resources to authorize it for access to your cluster.
What would the Helm chart for our demo application look like? In this directory, you'll see a k8s subdirectory, which in the previous example (hello-k8s) contained just the Kubernetes manifest files to deploy the application. Now it contains a Helm chart, in the demo directory:
ls k8s/demo
Chart.yaml prod-values.yaml staging-values.yaml templates
values.yaml
Let's use Helm to install the demo application. First, clean up the resources from any previous deployments:
kubectl delete all --selector app=demo
Then run the following command:
helm install demo ./k8s/demo
NAME: demo
LAST DEPLOYED: Wed Jun 6 10:48:50 2018
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: DEPLOYED
RESOURCES:
==> v1/Service
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
demo-service-dev ClusterIP 10.98.231.112 <none> 9999/TCP 0s
==> v1/Deployment
NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
demo-dev 1 1 1 0 0s
==> v1/Pod(related)
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
demo-dev-6c96484c48-69vss 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 0s
You can see that Helm has created a Deployment resource (which starts a Pod) and a Service, just as in the previous example. The helm install does this by creating a Kubernetes object called a Helm release.
Now you can go on to the next section: Manage the app with Helmfile.
This is a code example from the book 'Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes'. See the index for more examples.