Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
112 lines (75 loc) · 4.69 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

112 lines (75 loc) · 4.69 KB
Raw

Helm as a Package Manager

You can use Helm to package, distribute and install your Kubernetes Services or applications.

This document shows how easy is to install an application that has been packaged as a helm chart.

Installing Helm

Helm is a client-side only tool that will connect to your Kubernetes Clusters using the ./kube/config access tokens.

You can install Helm by following the instructions here.

Once you have Helm installed, you can add Helm Repositories which contains Helm Charts (packages).

For this tutorial you will be adding my Helm Repository which is hosted in a GitHub Site: https://salaboy.github.io/helm/

You can add this Helm repository to you Helm installation by running:

helm repo add fmtok8s https://salaboy.github.io/helm/

You will need to run helm update everytime you want to fetch the latest version of the charts or the first time after adding a new repository:

helm repo update

Installing the Conference Application

You can always do searchs against the added Helm repositories with helm search repo <Name>

For example, you can search the following application, which is hosted in my repository fmtok8s-app:

helm search repo fmtok8s-conference-chart

Should return:

NAME                            	CHART VERSION	APP VERSION	DESCRIPTION                               
fmtok8s/fmtok8s-conference-chart	v0.1.0       	0.1.0      	A Helm chart for a Conference Platform App

Which now you can install by running:

helm install conference fmtok8s/fmtok8s-conference-chart

You should see something like:

NAME: conference
LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Jun 23 08:35:15 2022
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None
NOTES:
Cloud-Native Conference Platform V1

Chart Deployed: fmtok8s-conference-chart - v0.1.0
Release Name: conference

The application is composed by 4 independent services that can be installed separately (and 2 databases: postgresql and redis), but the fmtok8s-conference-chart chart install them all configured to work together. The fmtok8s-conference-chart chart also comes with an Ingress resource defintion called frontend. For this to work you will need to have an NGINX Ingress Controller deployed in the cluster. If you are using KinD you can check how to get the ingress controller installed here.

You can check that the application is up and running by checking if the Kubernetes Pods have started and are in READY status:

kubectl get pods

You should see something like:

NAME                                                 READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
conference-fmtok8s-agenda-service-57576cb65c-sl27p   1/1     Running   0          42s
conference-fmtok8s-c4p-service-6c6f9449b5-j6ksv      1/1     Running   0          42s
conference-fmtok8s-email-service-6fdf958bdd-4pzww    1/1     Running   0          42s
conference-fmtok8s-frontend-5bf68cf65-zvlzq          1/1     Running   0          42s
conference-postgresql-0                              1/1     Running   0          42s
conference-redis-master-0                            1/1     Running   0          42s
conference-redis-replicas-0                          1/1     Running   0          42s

Now you are ready to point your browser to your Ingress public IP or if you are using KinD to: http://localhost

Conference Application Main Page

Google Cloud GKE ingress controller

The application by default includes an ingress, but the Ingress definition is cloud-agnostic. If you want to install NGINX ingress controller to read and manage this resource you can do it, but in Cloud Provider like GKE, you can use their Ingress controllers so you don't need to manage and maintain another thing besides your application.

If you want to use GKE Ingress controller you need to make the following changes to the ingress resource. You can edit the ingress resource by running:

kubectl edit ingress frontend

And then add and change the following lines:

  • Add an annotation: kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "gce"
  • Special path format, modify the existing one path: / to: path: /*
  • Special pathType, modify the existing one with pathType: ImplementationSpecific

This will instruct Google Cloud to provision a LoadBalancer and provide a public IP to access your applications that are running inside the cluster, in this case via the API Gateway Service.

If you get the ingress resource now, you should be able to see the public IP after the loadbalancer is provisioned and configured.