10 ms·

That's funny, because Helm is actually already keeping a revision history with Kubernetes primitives (the pods belonging to the old release are scaled down and

by yebyen 9y ago

That's funny, because Helm is actually already keeping a revision history with Kubernetes primitives (the pods belonging to the old release are scaled down and Helm marks the ReplicaSet as "superseded", from the prior release, that's how rollback works.) To begin with I have no doubt there are great reasons to keep all of that in a formal source control. I have always wondered about the decision to put all of the charts into a single "Kubernetes/charts" repo. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to have a repo for each chart, but then I guess you lose the capability of being able to pull them all down at once, or quickly update your local copies of everything in one shot. The charts are extremely small by design, maybe the overhead of a single git repo per chart was judged to be too much, and the value of having all the stable charts in one place was considered to be of greater magnitude. One common pattern I've seen is to put your charts directly into the application's source tree (which is certainly under version control.) This is how Draft sets up a chart. That seems OK to me, it seems very much like the creators of Helm would like for you to be able to get to work and having rollback capabilities without creating any (user-facing) dependency on a Git repository, or necessarily knowing anything about how to use Git or other SCM tools. (Draft takes this a step further; if you're using it to the fullest extent, then it generates a new release in Helm for every FS_NOTIFY as you save your work.)

jzelinskie 9y ago
>I have always wondered about the decision to put all of the charts into a single "Kubernetes/charts" repo. There's discussion happening right now among the Charts maintainers about changing this. If you're interested you can join the conversation in #charts on the Kubernetes slack. Full Disclosure: I'm an author of App Registry which is a project that attempts to integrate projects like Helm with registries like Quay on a multiple-repository basis.
- yebyen 9y ago
  Thanks! I will stop by and check it out, I'm already on this slack too.
lobster_johnson 9y ago
This is basically what we're doing: With each app, we put the chart in the app's repo itself, and we built a wrapper around Helm that performs deploys for us, using "helm upgrade --install ./k8s" from the file system. Keeping the chart with the app means it's versioned along with the app. (It's not a general-purpose wrapper; it's the CLI we use to manage anything related to our clusters and apps, basically: DNS, secrets, ad-hoc shells etc.) One of the things this wrapper does is ensure that every deploy is annotated with metadata — git revision, git branch, git repo, and also who deployed it. This allows a developer to run a status command to determine what versions of each app are currently deployed, and also show a log of new commits that haven't been deployed yet. It also means you can easily see that an app was deployed from a specific branch, for example. I think Helm's design is a bit flawed here. It's catering to two different purposes: One is deploying packaged versions of third-party software (e.g. PostgreSQL); the other is deploying your own software. There's an inherent conflict there in that the release process is different. Why can't Helm pull directly from git and use its revisions as version numbers? It doesn't make any sense for us to "publish" an app to a "repository" when we already have git. Right now, we're basically using Helm as a glorified templating system, and it's a somewhat buggy one, so we may decide to ditch Helm and use a pure templating solution instead. I haven't looked at Draft, but seeing as it's based on Helm, I'm not sure that it can improve on the basic design?
- yebyen 9y ago
  Draft is a very simple tool and it's not just based on Helm, it is using Helm under the hood. You will probably not find much use for Draft given the more advanced state of your tooling. It's been described as "a gateway drug to k8s" because, for the uninitiated, it simplifies the process of "OK, I want to put my app on K8s, what now?" – it sets you up with a reasonable default chart, and a dummy Dockerfile based on what kind of app the Draft logic decides your app is. (Eg. it's going to recommend ruby:onbuild if you have a Ruby app.) That might work out of the box, more likely you need to make some changes in the Dockerfile, but that could very well be all. It's really more like an advertisement for Deis. It's the "zeroconf" version of Deis. If you've never heard of Deis, I'll be happy to tell you more about that; Deis has a builder service/pod and acts as a git repository, so you set it up as a git remote with the deis commandline tool and 'git push deis' to prompt a release upgrade. It is more likely what you are probably expecting as a piece of your CI/CD solution. For people that aren't already fluent users of git, k8s, helm, charts... Draft is easier to get started with, and it gives a chance to expose you to all of those things, without making any of it prerequisite knowledge to spin up your app on k8s at once. For literally anyone else, you're going to get a much better experience from Deis, which is not only out of Beta but long past the 2.0 milestone (when it moved to K8s from the prior CoreOS/Fleet-based stack.) Deis is installed via helm, but after that you do not need to use the Helm client. Your apps can use Procfile-style or Dockerfile for deployments. The builder is very modern and developed, and as it evolves, it picks up a lot of efficiencies that you might have seen before on Heroku if you're familiar with that platform, making it very convenient to work with. (That also means it brings the baggage of 12-Factor, if you consider that as baggage...)

by yebyen 9y ago

jzelinskie 9y ago

>I have always wondered about the decision to put all of the charts into a single "Kubernetes/charts" repo. There's discussion happening right now among the Charts maintainers about changing this. If you're interested you can join the conversation in #charts on the Kubernetes slack. Full Disclosure: I'm an author of App Registry which is a project that attempts to integrate projects like Helm with registries like Quay on a multiple-repository basis.

yebyen 9y ago
Thanks! I will stop by and check it out, I'm already on this slack too.

lobster_johnson 9y ago

This is basically what we're doing: With each app, we put the chart in the app's repo itself, and we built a wrapper around Helm that performs deploys for us, using "helm upgrade --install ./k8s" from the file system. Keeping the chart with the app means it's versioned along with the app. (It's not a general-purpose wrapper; it's the CLI we use to manage anything related to our clusters and apps, basically: DNS, secrets, ad-hoc shells etc.) One of the things this wrapper does is ensure that every deploy is annotated with metadata — git revision, git branch, git repo, and also who deployed it. This allows a developer to run a status command to determine what versions of each app are currently deployed, and also show a log of new commits that haven't been deployed yet. It also means you can easily see that an app was deployed from a specific branch, for example. I think Helm's design is a bit flawed here. It's catering to two different purposes: One is deploying packaged versions of third-party software (e.g. PostgreSQL); the other is deploying your own software. There's an inherent conflict there in that the release process is different. Why can't Helm pull directly from git and use its revisions as version numbers? It doesn't make any sense for us to "publish" an app to a "repository" when we already have git. Right now, we're basically using Helm as a glorified templating system, and it's a somewhat buggy one, so we may decide to ditch Helm and use a pure templating solution instead. I haven't looked at Draft, but seeing as it's based on Helm, I'm not sure that it can improve on the basic design?

yebyen 9y ago
Draft is a very simple tool and it's not just based on Helm, it is using Helm under the hood. You will probably not find much use for Draft given the more advanced state of your tooling. It's been described as "a gateway drug to k8s" because, for the uninitiated, it simplifies the process of "OK, I want to put my app on K8s, what now?" – it sets you up with a reasonable default chart, and a dummy Dockerfile based on what kind of app the Draft logic decides your app is. (Eg. it's going to recommend ruby:onbuild if you have a Ruby app.) That might work out of the box, more likely you need to make some changes in the Dockerfile, but that could very well be all. It's really more like an advertisement for Deis. It's the "zeroconf" version of Deis. If you've never heard of Deis, I'll be happy to tell you more about that; Deis has a builder service/pod and acts as a git repository, so you set it up as a git remote with the deis commandline tool and 'git push deis' to prompt a release upgrade. It is more likely what you are probably expecting as a piece of your CI/CD solution. For people that aren't already fluent users of git, k8s, helm, charts... Draft is easier to get started with, and it gives a chance to expose you to all of those things, without making any of it prerequisite knowledge to spin up your app on k8s at once. For literally anyone else, you're going to get a much better experience from Deis, which is not only out of Beta but long past the 2.0 milestone (when it moved to K8s from the prior CoreOS/Fleet-based stack.) Deis is installed via helm, but after that you do not need to use the Helm client. Your apps can use Procfile-style or Dockerfile for deployments. The builder is very modern and developed, and as it evolves, it picks up a lot of efficiencies that you might have seen before on Heroku if you're familiar with that platform, making it very convenient to work with. (That also means it brings the baggage of 12-Factor, if you consider that as baggage...)