Overview

In this session, we will go through the basics of Kubernetes and Helm. We would be discussing the complexities of writing and managing Kubernetes Yaml’s and how we can overcome by Helm Charts. Next, a simple workflow demonstration of CICD involving Helm, Git, and Jenkins.

Goal

• To create Deployment, Service and Ingress using kubectl commands.
• To leverage Helm charts over Kubernetes yamls.
• Continuously delivering applications to Kubernetes using Helm.

Using Kubectl Commands

Let’s set our namespace as a environment variable. Note: Replace {{ username }} with actual username provided to you to login to the system

export NAMESPACE={{ username }}
Example: export NAMESPACE=user1

Let’s verify if our environment variable is set as your login username

echo $NAMESPACE

Now lets create a kubernetes namespace.

kubectl create namespace $NAMESPACE

Let’s clone helm-meetup repo from github

git clone https://github.com/kvenkata986/helm-meetup.git

Now lets navigate to helm-meetup/kubectl directory. List the files in the directory and you will notice three files deployment.yaml, service.yaml and ingress.yaml

cd helm-meetup/kubectl
ls -l

Now lets create Deployment, Service and Ingress using kubectl commands.

kubectl create -f deployment.yaml --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl create -f service.yaml --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl create -f ingress.yaml --namespace $NAMESPACE

Now lets verify if our Deployment, Service and Ingress are actually created.

kubectl get deployments --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl get service --namespace  $NAMESPACE
kubectl get ingress --namespace $NAMESPACE

Note: After creating an ingress in Google cloud, it will take approximately 25min to get a Public IP

To see our simple-web page, lets do curl on our deployment

ip=$(kubectl get service --namespace $NAMESPACE | grep myfirst-service | awk '{print $3}'); curl http://$ip:80

Now lets delete our Deployment, Service and Ingress.

kubectl delete deployment myfirst-deployment --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl delete service myfirst-service --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl delete ingress myfirst-ingress --namespace $NAMESPACE

Using helm Commands

Now lets navigate to helm directory. List the files in the directory and you will notice Chart.yaml, values.yaml files and templates/ directory.

cd ../helm
ls -l

Now lets see if any helm charts are installed in your namespace.

helm list --namespace $NAMESPACE

Now lets install helm-nginx chart.

helm install . --name my-first-helm-chart-$NAMESPACE --namespace $NAMESPACE

Now lets verify if helm chart was successfully installed in your namespace.

helm list --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl get deployments --namespace $NAMESPACE
kubectl get service --namespace  $NAMESPACE
kubectl get ingress --namespace $NAMESPACE

To see our simple-web page, lets do curl on our deployment

ip=$(kubectl get service --namespace $NAMESPACE | grep myfirst-service | awk '{print $3}'); curl http://$ip:80

Now lets update some values in helm charts. lets scale our pod count to 9 and upgrade simple-web version to 1.1

helm upgrade --set replica=9,version="1.1" my-first-helm-chart-$NAMESPACE . --namespace $NAMESPACE

To see our upgraded simple-web page, lets do curl on our deployment

ip=$(kubectl get service --namespace $NAMESPACE | grep myfirst-service | awk '{print $3}'); curl http://$ip:80

Now lets delete of helm charts

 helm delete my-first-helm-chart-$NAMESPACE