IVAN...HELM CHARTS What are Helm charts, when use existing, when create your own? Use existing...

Awesome CI / CDfor applications

running on Kubernetes

IVANILVES

© 2019 Binlogic.

WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT?CI/CD pipelines for applications running on Kubernetes

● Difference from a “normal” CI/CD

● Helm and Helm charts, why these are important?

● A handful tips and tools

CI CD

CICDContinuous Integration / Continuous Deployment

● Practices that help developers to deliver value faster and safer

● Set of actions that run after code changes or on the time basis

● “One-stop shop” to build, test, deploy and analyze your software

© 2019 Binlogic.

KUBERNETESThe biggest hype in tech industry since … I don’t remember what ...

● Leading container orchestration system, … and it’s open source!

● Uniform API to manage both your applications and infrastructure

● A way to make your company’s tech ecosystem great ...

● … a way to elegantly waste tons of time, effort and money

© 2019 Binlogic.

WHY KUBERNETES?Why do I need this piece of technology? What are my benefits?

● Manage all your resources programmatically with a single API

● Complete, reproducible environments with declarative manifests

● Higher abstraction level, you can create cloud-agnostic setups

ANY REAL DIFFERENCE?How CI/CD for Kubernetes is different from a “normal” CI/CD?

● You work with a single, uniform API (“Cloud-Native English”)

● Feedback looks are significantly shorter (seconds vs minutes)

● Usually you take an existing slice of resources from a shared pool

● The only artifact you produce is an application Docker image

WHAT THE HELM?What are Helm charts, when to use existing, when to create own?

● Package manager for Kubernetes, the first and the most popular

● Tool to render Kubernetes YAML templates against any value sets

● Chart repositories provide you with ready to use building blocks:

● public https://github.com/helm/charts private https://chartmuseum.com

HELM CHARTSWhat are Helm charts, when use existing, when create your own?

● Use existing charts if possible, it’s hard to maintain your own!

● In case no specialized chart is available, nice “one-size-fits-all”:

● github.com/cloudposse/charts/tree/master/incubator/monochart

● If you created your own, try to make it generic and open source

STAGING FOR THE WINEphemeral staging environments, create as many as you need!

● You deploy into a shared resource pool, deployments are cheap

● Helm comes to play here, with per-environment values & secrets

● Ephemeral: deploy into an exclusive namespace, scrap it at night

● Spot instances for the staging cluster: https://t.co/y3OLAIywuM

IMAGE SEPARATIONSeparation of base and code images, why it is important?

● Stick to a few base images, use these base images to build all your apps

● Prefer public base images, otherwise take serious care of your ones

● Make your application image build manifest as small as possible:∙ for build speed, runtime security, and overall manageability

● kubeval https://github.com/instrumenta/kubeval

● helmfile https://github.com/roboll/helmfile

● dive https://github.com/wagoodman/dive

● KIND https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind

● draft https://github.com/Azure/draft

Great tools that can improve your developer experience

● Kubernetes is complex and messy, but gives you a lot of power ;)

● Whatever cloud resource exists, there is a Kubernetes object for it

● Kubernetes CI/CD is blazingly fast comparing with EC2/GCP/AVM

● Helm allows you to manage YAML and brings ready-to-use blocks

● Don’t just use raw YAMLs, use some tooling to deploy properly

CONCLUSIONS?

Q/A● GitHub: @ivanilves● Twitter: @ivanilves

© 2019 Binlogic.