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Helm 2.0 stable release

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Re: Helm 2.0 stable release

#11

Post by AlexB138 »

swozey wrote: post #7
AlexB138 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't currently use K8s, but am planning to get into it soon. Could you clarify the difference or advantage between using a Kubernetes specific package manager like Helm vs using a container repository? Isn't part of the point of containers to use prebuilt immutable containers?

I use Helm to deploy containers to various environments and clusters in k8s using its gotepl/sprig template system. The last thing that I want to do with my containers is to lock my environment variables inside of them, then I'm going to need multiple sets of containers per microservice (prod, staging, yaddayadda) and have to go through the process of docker commit, push, etc. Beyond that there are also a lot of Kube…

Thanks for the answer.

So, again, coming from a place of having done a couple passes of the basics, but otherwise completely ignorant.

What is the advantage of having that kind of config info baked into a package vs having it in etcd?

Again, I really appreciate it.

Re: Helm 2.0 stable release

#12

Post by joseph »

AlexB138 wrote: post #11
swozey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Helm to deploy containers to various environments and clusters in k8s using its gotepl/sprig template system. The last thing that I want to do with my containers is to lock my environment variables inside of them, then I'm going to need multiple sets of containers per microservice (prod, staging, yaddayadda) and have to go through the process of docker commit, push, etc. Beyond that there are also a lot of Kube…

Thanks for the answer. So, again, coming from a place of having done a couple passes of the basics, but otherwise completely ignorant. What is the advantage of having that kind of config info baked into a package vs having it in etcd? Again, I really appreciate it.

When you deploy with Kubernetes, you need some yaml or json files to define the configuration of your stack. Depending on the complexity of the stack, this could grow to a significant number of files. Helm allows this collection of files to be put into a single shareable package. Then, rather than calling the 'kubectl' command a number of times to deploy each individual component, you'd make one call to Helm to do it all at once.

Re: Helm 2.0 stable release

#14

Post by dkoston »

AlexB138 wrote: post #6
wstrange wrote: post #2

For those wondering what helm is all about: Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. It allows you to search for and install "charts" - which are pre-packaged applications that can be deployed on Kubernetes. I have been using it for the past month - and am really enjoying it. Congrats to the helm team.

I don't currently use K8s, but am planning to get into it soon. Could you clarify the difference or advantage between using a Kubernetes specific package manager like Helm vs using a container repository? Isn't part of the point of containers to use prebuilt immutable containers?

Immutable containers still may need specific names when they are launched, netowrking settings, etc. Helm holds your deployment configs.

Think about having a redis cluster. You need 6 redis containers (at minimum), known names to add to your connection settings in your apps, a job container to run redis-trib, etc.

Using helm has let us define a redis cluster configuration that we know works well and anyone at the company can now launch one just by flipping out the pod (container) names, setting a namespace, and configuring memory and CPU limits.

For monolithic applications this stuff won't be super useful (or for simple software applications) but in a modern SOA, it saves us tons of time. Need a HA Postgres setup for your new microservice? Great, just change the name of the database pods to match your service name and run "helm install -f my-service-db.yaml postgres"

For us at Help.com, it's the new Ansible. We run everything in kubernetes and Helm ensures we have consistent deployments of containers for database clusters, redis clusters, message queue clusters, etc.

In addition, the delete feature is amazing when developing your configs. Previously we had to run a ton of kubectl commands to clean up after testing runs or put stuff in a specific namespace which we deleted and recreated. With Helm, we can simply delete a Helm release and it takes care of removing the pods, services, deployments, secrets, etc.

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