Effortless Helm Chart Deployments (Video & Slides)
Learn how to deploy complex service-oriented architectures easily using Helmfiles. Forget umbrella charts and manual helm deployments. Helmfile is the missing piece of the puzzle. Helmfiles are the declarative way to deploy Helm charts in a 12-factor compatible way. They're great for deploying all your kubernetes services and even for Codefresh continuous delivery to Kubernetes. We'll show you exactly how we do it with a live demo, including public repos for all our helmfiles.
SweetOps Town Hall Meeting
Today we had our first “Town Hall” meeting where members of our SweetOps community (slack.cloudposse.com) got together on a Zoom conference call to talk shop.
Remember to vote when we should have our next call.
Discussion Points
Pain Points
There were a few shared pain points by members.
- Keeping modules up to date is tedious, especially in busy environments where modules are released frequently. We wish there was a way to identify out of date modules and easily update those module references. Erik mentioned that he submitted a “Feature Request” for Dependabot to support HCL. Please ? if you think this would be awesome!
- Loren mentioned that using Open Source in Govcloud is difficult because Govcloud lags way behind the commercial AWS cloud in features. For example, EC2 instance tags cannot be set on launch. Other times, API endpoint URLs just don't work because they've been hardcoded to the ones used by the commercial cloud offering.
- Erik mentioned that OAuth2 Proxy appears to be an abandoned project. With over 90+ open pull requests, broken OpenID Connect support and no new releases in over a year, maybe it's time for a new maintainer. Apparently, others have suggested this too.
Technologies
A number of technologies came up in our discussions
- Atlantis – Continuous Delivery for Terraform
https://github.com/runatlantis/atlantis
https://www.runatlantis.io/ – commercial offering may be in the works - Bitly OAuth2 Proxy – BeyondCorp style Identity Aware Proxy
https://github.com/bitly/oauth2_proxy - Geodesic – base image & toolkit for cloud automation (works with WSL)
https://github.com/cloudposse/geodesic - Probot – GitHub bot for automation of Pull Requests and Issues
https://github.com/probot/probot - Terrafile – Declarative file for downloading terraform modules
https://github.com/claranet/python-terrafile - Terrible – Automating Terraform with Ansible (proved to be a “terrible” idea)
https://github.com/antonbabenko/terrible - Test Kitchen for Terraform
https://github.com/newcontext-oss/kitchen-terraform - Bats – Bash Automated Testing Framework
https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core
Services
- Dependabot – Get Pull Requests to update package dependencies or Docker base images. Love it.
http://dependabot.com/ - Pull Reminders – Get Slack notifications/reminders for Pull Requests; we use this everyday at Cloud Posse & love it.
https://pullreminders.com/ - TerraHub – Managed Continuous Delivery of Terraform
http://terrahub.io/ - Doodle – Collaborative Calendar Scheduling
https://doodle.com/
Other Links
- “GitOps: A Path to More Self-service IT” (2018-07-09)
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3237207
Attendees
Resolutions
- Hold these “Town Hall” meetings more often (perhaps weekly) and at different times so that we can include members in all geographies and time zones.
- Ensure we record and publish the next call
Unlimited Staging Environments with Kubernetes
Last week we had the pleasure of listening to David Huie present at the DevOps Mastermind at WeWork Promenade. David is an infrastructure engineer at Dollar Shave Club, where he’s helping DSC shave the world using Kubernetes. He presented how they've achieved the Holy Grail of QA automation: running “Unlimited Staging Environments with Kubernetes.”
Problem
In modern micro-services architectures, there is a serious need for ad-hoc staging environments since it's often infeasible for developers to run the entire stack on their laptops. At the same time, static staging environments can be difficult to scale as an organization's infrastructure and engineering team grow.
Solution
To counter this effect, Dollar Shave Club created a Kubernetes-based system to enable an unlimited number of environments, bounded only by the capacity of the underlying Kubernetes cluster running some 38 nodes! At its core, is an Open Source project called Furan which rapidly builds Docker containers in Docker (DnD). Using their CI/CD system and an in-house tool called Amino, they are then able to automatically spawn environments composed of many independent projects, where each project is pegged to a specific version (e.g. branch or tag).
Outcome
The company is able to iterate much faster which has sped up application delivery at DSC.
About the Speaker
Prior to joining Dollar Shave Club, David’s worked at Splice, NationBuilder, and Yelp. David has a degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College.
Follow David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidhuie
Slides
Slides from the presentation are below. We'll be posting video & transcripts shortly.
Unlimited Staging Environments with Kubernetes
Join us at the next Santa Monica DevOps Mastermind Meetup!
Register here: https://www.meetup.com/DevOpsMastermind/