Helm
Up until now, we deployed our resources to Kubernetes using kubectl apply, and it has served us well. Looking back, our deployment of podinfo consists of the following manifests (omitting the needed ingress controller):
podinfo-deployment.yamlpodinfo-clusterip.yamlorpodinfo-nodeport.yamlpodinfo-ingress.yaml
While this is still bearable, it gets tedious when the number of microservices grows - they all might need services, storage, configuration, etc., and we have to keep track of all of them. We might want to look for different ways of deploying to Kubernetes.
Helm is one such way. It is a package manager for Kubernetes, and it allows us to define our resources in a single place. We can then install or upgrade our resources with a single command. Even better, we can configure our resources with variables, so-called values, at deploy or upgrade time.
While we won't learn how to package our own applications (called Charts) in this workshop, we will have a short look at how to use Helm to deploy applications using Helm.
First, though, we need to install the Helm CLI.
Created: September 18, 2023