Sailing the 7 seas with Kubernetes Helm

18 May 2017

Helm is THE Kubernetes Package Manager. Think of it like a way to yum install your applications, but, in Kubernetes. You might ask, “Heck, a deployment will give me most of what I need. Why don’t I just create a pod spec?” The thing is that Helm will give you a way to template those specs, and give you a workflow for managing those templates by what it calls “charts”. Today we’ll go ahead and step through the process of installing Helm, installing a pre-built pod given an existing chart, and then we’ll make an existing chart of our own and deploy it – and we’ll change some template values so that it runs in a couple different ways. Ready? Anchors aweigh…

The beginning base of these instruction on the official quickstart guide. We’ll then extrapolate from there as there’s a few considerations that we have now.

We need to configure RBAC, which isn’t officially covered yet. The official way they say to do it is to turn off RBAC – nope, not going to do that.
We’re also going to make our own Helm charts, which aren’t covered in the quick start guide, so we’ll expand from there.

Requirements

So, this assumes you’ve already got a Kubernetes cluster up and running, and usually… These articles assume CentOS 7.3 running. It might not exactly require CentOS 7.3 this time, but, just know that’s my reference, and I’m using Kubernetes 1.6.

If you don’t have a Kubernetes cluster up, may I recommend using my kube-ansible playbooks – and I’ve got an article detailing how to use those playbooks.

Optionally – you can create persistent volumes. You can skip this step if you want, but, the example charts that we will install require some volume persistence. We’ll run it with persistence turned off, but, it’s “more realistic” if-you-will. And if you don’t have persistent volumes setup, you might want to try my method for using GlusterFS to back persistent volumes, as detailed in this blog post.

About Helm

Helm is really two parts, a client and a server. The client is helm and the server is tiller – all the boat references! Cause the definition of your applications are called charts.

So if you’re at the helm of a ship, and you steer (according to your charts), you’d move your tiller. See? All the ships!

These charts are essentially templates for how to deploy your pods. Without helm, you’d just create specs which are yaml files which define how the pod is to be run. But, using helm – we can make charts which make for more flexible specs. That way we can run the same application with differing parameters in the same or a different cluster.

Why not template them with Ansible, then? You could, too. But, using helm gives us a more direct work-flow for define the charts and deploying them, and should free up our playbooks to allow for lower-level infrastructure creation, and let our applications be abstracted from that, and let us leverage what Kubernetes has to offer without having to overly complicate our playbooks for applications – which should likely require more frequent reconfiguration than the underlying pieces. For the record, in my opinion – using Ansible isn’t the wrong way. It’s just another way.

Download Helm

Let’s pick out a version from the github releases of helm and download the binary onto our Kubernetes master server.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ curl -sL https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-helm/helm-v2.4.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz > helm.tar.gz
[centos@kube-master ~]$ tar -xzvf helm.tar.gz 
[centos@kube-master ~]$ chmod +x linux-amd64/helm 
[centos@kube-master ~]$ sudo cp linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin

Now, let’s check its version.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm version
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.4.1", GitCommit:"46d9ea82e2c925186e1fc620a8320ce1314cbb02", GitTreeState:"clean"}

It will also take a second to complete, and then timeout and probably complain that it can’t connect to tiller. Which is fine for now. So, that’s coming up soon.

Run `helm init`

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm init

That should start tiller for us – so you’ll have to watch for it come up, go ahead and watch -n1 kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

And we’ll have to create an RBAC for it, too. I used this gist as a reference.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ kubectl --namespace kube-system create sa tiller
serviceaccount "tiller" created
[centos@kube-master ~]$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding tiller --clusterrole cluster-admin --serviceaccount=kube-system:tiller
clusterrolebinding "tiller" created
[centos@kube-master ~]$ kubectl --namespace kube-system patch deploy/tiller-deploy -p '{"spec": {"template": {"spec": {"serviceAccountName": "tiller"}}}}'
deployment "tiller-deploy" patched

Go ahead and watch your pods, cause it’s going to restart the tiller pod, so do something like watch -n1 kubectl get pods --all-namespaces until it comes back.

Let’s run an example app

Let’s go ahead and update our repo.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm repo update

And then we can install say… MongoDB (I’m wearing a MongoDB t-shirt today, so why not that one). If you’d like to install something else checkout the official “stable” repo and see what’s available.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm install --set persistence.enabled=false stable/mongodb

Note that we’re already doing something that sets Helm apart from “just using a spec file”. Like, if you’re familiar with my other tutorials you may have seen me create pods from specs before, where I’ve created a yaml file, and then I tell kubernetes to create it with something like kubectl create -f mongodb.yaml.

So running that helm install is going to give you some output like this (I clipped out some of the output)…

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm install --set persistence.enabled=false stable/mongodb
[...snip...]
NOTES:
MongoDB can be accessed via port 27017 on the following DNS name from within your cluster:
silly-ladybird-mongodb.default.svc.cluster.local

To connect to your database run the following command:

   kubectl run silly-ladybird-mongodb-client --rm --tty -i --image bitnami/mongodb --command -- mongo --host silly-ladybird-mongodb

So let’s go ahead and use mongo for fun. Note, this command is going to take a while because Kube is going to pull a new image for you.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ kubectl run silly-ladybird-mongodb-client --rm --tty -i --image bitnami/mongodb --command -- mongo --host fallacious-giraffe-mongodb

You might have to hit enter, and it lets you know to do that too.

Let’s do something with it while we’re here.

> use kitchen;
switched to db kitchen
> db.kitchen.insert({"beer": {"heady topper": 4,"sip of sunshine": "awww yeah"}})
> db.kitchen.find().pretty()
{
  "_id" : ObjectId("591cb31956ed4d11bd5b82c0"),
  "beer" : {
    "heady topper" : 4,
    "sip of sunshine" : "awww yeah"
  }
}

Ok, cool, it works!

So what about some visibility of what charts we have deployed? Run helm list to check it out for yourself. This is a list of what are referred to as “releases”.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm list
NAME        REVISION  UPDATED                   STATUS    CHART           NAMESPACE
aged-uakari 1         Wed May 17 20:26:18 2017  DEPLOYED  mongodb-0.4.10  default  

Then you can go ahead and remove this sample one.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm delete aged-uakari
release "aged-uakari" deleted

Let’s create our own chart

I got a little help for creating a first chart from this blog post. Let’s go ahead and create our own.

We’re going to try to create an nginx instance that serves a photograph of a pickle. Because, that is absurd enough for me.

Scaffolding your chart, and basic commands

The first thing you’ll do is scaffold your chart.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm create pickle-chart

That will create a directory ./pickle-chart with the contents you need to create a chart. The contents look about like so:

[centos@kube-master ~]$ find pickle-chart/
pickle-chart/
pickle-chart/Chart.yaml
pickle-chart/templates
pickle-chart/templates/ingress.yaml
pickle-chart/templates/deployment.yaml
pickle-chart/templates/service.yaml
pickle-chart/templates/NOTES.txt
pickle-chart/templates/_helpers.tpl
pickle-chart/charts
pickle-chart/values.yaml
pickle-chart/.helmignore

You can check if the syntax is ok with a helm lint like so:

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm lint pickle-chart
==> Linting pickle-chart
[INFO] Chart.yaml: icon is recommended

1 chart(s) linted, no failures

And you can wrap it all up with helm package, which will make a tarball for you.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm package pickle-chart
[centos@kube-master ~]$ ls -lh pickle-chart-0.1.0.tgz 
-rw-rw-r--. 1 centos centos 2.2K May 18 17:54 pickle-chart-0.1.0.tgz

Let’s edit the charts to make them our own

Change your directory into the newly created ./pickle-chart dir. First let’s look at Chart.yaml in this directory – this is a bunch of meta data for our chart. I edited mine to look like:

apiVersion: v1
description: An nginx instance that serves a pickle photo
name: pickle-chart
version: 0.0.1

Now, move into the ./templates/ directory and you’re going to see a few things here – yaml files, but, they’re templates. And they’re templated as sprig templates.

If you’ve created pod specs before, these won’t seem too too weird, at least in name. Especially deployment.yaml and service.yaml. As you could imagine, these define a deployment, and a service. Feel free to surf around these and explore for yourself to get an idea of what you could customize, or better yet, add to.

Let’s modify the values.yaml – this is where the values of the majority of the parameters for the template come from.

Including the docker image that we’re going to use, which is dougbtv/pickle-nginx – should you care to build the image yourself, I posted the dockerfile and context as a gist.

We’re going to leave the majority of values.yaml as the default. I change the image section and also added the pickletype.

IMPORTANT: Github page didn’t like the embedded templates here in the markdown for my blog, it would fail building them. So you’ll have to pick up these two files from this gist.. Copy out both the values.yaml and deployment.yaml. And use them here.

Now, modify the ./templates/deployment.yaml. Again, most of it is default, but, you’ll see that I added an env section. This is used by the image to do something, more than “just statically deploy” – we’ll get to that in a moment.

Cool, that’s all set for now.

Let’s run our brand spankin’ new Helm charts!

Alright, so, now make sure you’re up a directory from the ./pickle-chart directory, and let’s fire it off.

Install the chart like so:

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm install ./pickle-chart

Now, wait until it’s fully deployed, I do this by watching like this:

[centos@kube-master ~]$ watch -n1 kubectl get pods --show-all

And wait until it’s showing as running.

Now – it creates a service for us, so let’s check out what that service is with kubectl get svc.

Here’s the IP it’s listening on:

[centos@kube-master ~]$ kubectl get svc | grep -i pickle | awk '{print $2}'

We’ll save that as a variable and curl it.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ pickle_ip=$(kubectl get svc | grep -i pickle | awk '{print $2}')
[centos@kube-master ~]$ curl -s $pickle_ip | grep -i img
    <img src="pickle.png" />

Great, now note that the img src is pickle.png. This – we have made configurable, so let’s deploy our chart differently.

First I’ll go and delete the release. So list the charts and delete, a la:

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm list
NAME                REVISION  UPDATED                   STATUS    CHART               NAMESPACE
interesting-buffalo 1         Thu May 18 19:51:51 2017  DEPLOYED  pickle-chart-0.0.1  default  
[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm delete interesting-buffalo
release "interesting-buffalo" deleted

Now – we’re going to run this differently by changing a default value in our template.

[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm install --set pickletype=pickle-man ./pickle-chart

This sets the pickletype which will change something our application.

Now, go ahead and pick up the IP from the service again, and we’ll curl it…

[centos@kube-master ~]$ pickle_ip=$(kubectl get svc | grep -i pickle | awk '{print $2}')
[centos@kube-master ~]$ curl -s $pickle_ip | grep -i img
    <img src="pickle-man.png" />

We can now see that we’re serving a different photo – this time a pickle cartoon that is a “pickle man” as opposed to… Just a pickle.

Oh yeah – and you can deploy from a tarball…

[centos@kube-master ~]$ rm pickle-chart-0.1.0.tgz 
[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm package pickle-chart/
[centos@kube-master ~]$ helm install pickle-chart-0.0.1.tgz 

Or you can install from an absolute URL containing the tarball, too.

And there you have it – you’ve gone ahead and…

Installed Helm
Installed a sample application (mongodb)
Created your own helm chart
Deployed a release
Change the parameters for the templated values to create a new release with different parameters.

Good luck sailing the 7 seas!

dougbtv

Sailing the 7 seas with Kubernetes Helm

Requirements

About Helm

Download Helm

Run helm init

Let’s run an example app

Let’s create our own chart

Scaffolding your chart, and basic commands

Let’s edit the charts to make them our own

Let’s run our brand spankin’ new Helm charts!

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Run `helm init`