focused-labs/helm-intro

Wrangling Your Deployments With CI/CD & Helm

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First Thank you

1. Connecting is hard this meetup is awesome
2. Hosting and organizing

Who am I?

• I'm Austin Vance. I have done a few things mostly coding or managing operations teams.

• I have a history at Pivotal, EMC, Dell, and Paypal.

• Now I have Focused Labs and we are a growing amazing team!

  • Focused's goal is to bring agility to operations and software development

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Why Kubernetes

1. Config driven deployments
2. Containers are first class
3. Multi cloud by design
4. No Magic
5. Really fun to operate
6. Really fun to deploy to

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BUT - Kubernetes is hard - it's a lot to learn

• A single app nees Pod, deployment, replicaset, service, ingress, networkpolicy, and a lot more
• Updates, rollbacks, and roll outs require some forethought
• Unique deployments for different environemnts are impossible with native objects (if we ignore kustomize... that's for a different talk)

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In comes Helm

What is helm?

Helm is a templeting engine and deployment manager for kubernetes.

But it's become so much more...

Helm is an:

• ecosystem of software you can run on kubernetes with standard reasonable config
• a dependncy managment system
• a rollback rollforward manager
• a configuration a code manager

Why Helm

• Helm is easy!
• Written in GoLang
• The templates look intimidating at first but there's not much to it
• Helps organize all your k8s configuration
• Easily parameterize dynamic k8s config between environments
• Install, upgrade, rollback for a package of k8s config files
• Version tracking

Lets deploy something with helm

How about an upgrade

Creating your own

helm create <name>

Let's take a look at what gets created.

Golang Templating Language

• Helm uses the Go templating language with Sprig functions included
• --dry-run will help you verify templated yaml
• My source of friendly reminder YAML docs
• Looks intimidating at first, but it's really not all that and a bag of chips

Pro Tips:

1. SHA sum config/secrets to force pod restarts in deployment.yaml

Now lets talk some CI

https://ci.withfocus.com

Application version: <build_number>_<git_short_sha>

Audit Artifacts:

1. Application Artifact: Docker image containing your built application. Published to an ECR repository under <aws_account_number>.dkr.ecr.<aws_region>.amazonaws.com/<ecr_repo_name>:<application_version>
2. Automated Test Artifact: Publish test result <nexus/S3/etc>
3. Manual Test Artifact: Acceptance of JIRA tickets indicate that a representative of the business has manually interacted with the feature and verified it works as expected.
4. Automated vulnerability scanning before promotion:
   • passing builds are candidates for promotion to staging/production.

Further Reading

• Helm Hub
• Concourse
• FluxCD