One of the challenges I face in my development setup is that I want to quickly and often create and deploy my robotics stack. I often want to change and redeploy my entire stack from scratch, because I want to iterate quickly and also reduce my costs as much as possible. My Jenkins jobs have helped a great deal here, and automation is definitely key. However I have recently started experimenting with Kubernetes Helm which is a package manager for Kubernetes which has made this even easier for me.

Kubernetes Helm

Helm is a package manager that allows you to define a package with all its dependent deployment objects for Kubernetes. With helm and this package you can then ask a cluster to install the entire package in one go instead of passing individual deployment commands. This means for me that instead of asking Kubernetes to install each of my several micro-services to be installed I simply ask it to install the entire package/release in one atomic action which also includes all of the dependent services like databases and message brokers I use.

Installing Helm

In this blog I want to give a small taste on how nice Helm is. So how do we get started? Well in order to get started with Helm you should first follow the installation instructions at this page: https://github.com/kubernetes/helm/blob/master/docs/install.md

In case you are using OSX (like me) its relatively simple if you are using homebrew, simply run the following cask:

brew cask install helm

Once helm is installed it should also be installed in your cluster. In my case I will be testing against a minikube installation as described in my previous post: https://renzedevries.wordpress.com/2016/11/07/using-kubernetes-minikube-for-local-test-deployments/

On the command line I have a kubernetes command line client (kubectl) with my configuration pointing towards my minikube cluster. The only thing I have to do is the following to install Helm in my cluster:

helm init

This will install a container named tiller in my cluster, this container will understand how to deploy the Helm packages (charts) into my cluster. This is in essence the main endpoint the helm client will use to interrogate the cluster for package deployments and package changes.

Creating the package

Next we need to start creating something which is called a Chart, this is the unit of packaging in Helm. For this post I will reduce the set of services I have used in previous posts and only deploy the core services Cassandra, MQTT and ActiveMQ. The first thing to define is the *Chart.yaml** which is the package manifest:

Chart.yaml

The manifest looks pretty simple, most important is the version number, the rest is mainly metadata for indexing:

name: robotics version: 0.1 description: Robotic automation stack keywords: - robotics - application maintainers: - name: Renze de Vries engine: gotpl

The second I am going to define is the deployment objects I want to deploy. For this we create a ‘Charts’ subdirectory which contains these dependent services. In this case I am going to deploy MQTT, ActiveMQ and Cassandra which are required for my project. For each of these services I create a templates folder which contains the Kubernetes Deployment.yaml descriptor and Kubernetes service descriptor file and have their own Charts.yaml file as well.

When you have this all ready it look as following:



I am not going to write out all the files in this blog, if you want to have a look at the full source have a look at the github repository here that contains the full Helm chart structure describe in this post: https://github.com/renarj/helm-repo

Packaging a release

Now that the Chart source files have been created the last thing to do is to create the actual package. For this we have to do nothing else than simply run the following command:

helm package .

This will create a file called robotics-0.1.tgz that we can use further to deploy our release. In a future blog post I will talk a bit about Helm repositories and how you can distribute these packages, but for now we keep them on the local file system.

Installing a release

Once we have defined the packages the only thing thats remaining is to simply install a release into the cluster. This will install all the services that are packaged in the Chart.

In order to install the package we have created above we just have to run the following command:

helm install robotics-0.1.tgz NAME: washing-tuatar LAST DEPLOYED: Sun Nov 6 20:42:30 2016 NAMESPACE: default STATUS: DEPLOYED RESOURCES: ==> v1/Service NAME CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE amq 10.0.0.59 <nodes> 61616/TCP 1s mqtt 10.0.0.131 <nodes> 1883/TCP 1s cassandra-svc 10.0.0.119 <nodes> 9042/TCP,9160/TCP 1s ==> extensions/Deployment NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE mqtt 1 1 1 0 1s amq 1 1 1 0 1s cassandra 1 1 1 0 1s

We can ask Helm which packages are installed in the cluster by simply asking a list of installed packages as following:

helm list NAME REVISION UPDATED STATUS CHART washing-tuatar 1 Sun Nov 6 20:42:30 2016 DEPLOYED robotics-0.1

Please note that the name for the installation is a random generated name, in case you want a well known name you can install using the ‘-name’ switch and specify the name yourself.

In order to delete all the deployed objects I can simply ask Helm to uninstall the release as following:

helm delete washing-tuatar

Conclusion

I have found that Helm has a big potential, it allows me to very quickly define a full software solution composed out of many individual deployments. In a future blog post I will talk a bit more about the templating capabilities of Helm and the packaging and distributing of your packages. In the end I hope this blog shows everyone that with Helm you can make all of your Kubernetes work even easier than it already is today 🙂