Universal-Kubernetes-Helm-Charts VS Kubernetes-Volume-Autoscaler

I would point you to what I call the "Universal Helm Charts" and some examples of how to use them.

Shameless Plug: Here's one of my dashboards I made for Ingress-Nginx, which is my recommended border router/gateway into all the services. It adds deep robust metrics and configurability, and if you've got years of experience with Nginx also, it allows you rich complex customization via nginx's configuration structure via kubernetes annotations. Besides that I have open-source helm charts which are easy to use, boilerplates showing how to use them, a volume autoscaler to automatically resize your disks as they get full, and a blog where I share various of my experience which is a companion blog to my upcoming book of the same name. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you have any further questions.

You may want to check out some other of my Helm Boilerplates to explain and highlight how using subcharts works. This is a companion repo to my upcoming DevOps + Kubernetes book. You also might like to check out my set of open-source universal helm charts which are published in a helm registry right now that you can leverage and has many industry best-practices built into it, such as anti-affinity rules, pod disruption budgets, horizontal pod autoscaling, ingress, service support, etc.

References: I use docker and Kubernetes daily. I currently manage numerous clusters and maintain pipelines for hundreds of microservices as I type this. I've been converting microservices into Docker images for companies hundreds if not thousands of times by now over the last bunches of years. I am also an avid and passionate open-source evangelist and Kubernetes/DevOps consultant. I author some Kubernetes controllers such as the Volume Autoscaler and have a set of Open Source Helm Charts and I love to contribute code/fixes wherever I run into issues.

If it helps at all I have some universal helm charts that have a template for easily deploying your application as a deployment or statefulset. You will notice I don’t even have a daemonset chart because it doesn’t make sense to. https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Universal-Kubernetes-Helm-Charts

See: Open-Source Universal Helm Charts See: Boilerplates of using Open-Source Helm Charts (as a sub-chart)

Helm charts - https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Universal-Kubernetes-Helm-Charts Example using helm charts as sub charts - https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-echoserver

A open-source set of Universal Helm Charts with tons of best-practices baked into it such as autoscaling, PDBs, labeling, and an standardized set of "universal" templates that allows you to pivot between templates easily (meaning, you can easily make a deployment into a Statefulset or a Cronjob). Yes, I need to add more documentation, I know. I'm busy :P

Universal Kubernetes Helm Charts

Additionally if you don't know, Kubernetes freshly setup, especially AWS's EKS is largely useless after you first set it up. You need to then install roughly a dozen other services into it to make it "do all the magic automatically". Services such as aws-ebs-csi-driver, (optional) aws-efs-csi-driver, (optional) aws-fsx-csi-driver, aws-load-balancer-controller, (optional) aws-node-termination-handler, cluster-autoscaler, (optional) external-dns, logs cascading engine (eg: fluentd-elasticsearch / fluent-bit-elasticsearch / datadog), grafana, prometheus, your ingress controller of choice (I prefer and recommend ingress-nginx), and the Kubernetes Volume Autoscaler to auto-scale up EBS volumes. (shameless plug: I wrote the volume-autoscaler)

Shameless Plug: Here's one of my dashboards I made for Ingress-Nginx, which is my recommended border router/gateway into all the services. It adds deep robust metrics and configurability, and if you've got years of experience with Nginx also, it allows you rich complex customization via nginx's configuration structure via kubernetes annotations. Besides that I have open-source helm charts which are easy to use, boilerplates showing how to use them, a volume autoscaler to automatically resize your disks as they get full, and a blog where I share various of my experience which is a companion blog to my upcoming book of the same name. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you have any further questions.

Do not waste your timesetting up your own Kubernetes cluster; use any cloud provider's fully managed Kubernetes cluster, and then learn how to configure everything on it to do everything you want. Typically, there are anywhere between 10-30 foundational services you'll want to install on it to make everything work. Things such as Cluster-Autoscaler, an ingress controller, a mesh network technology, various CSI volume provisioners, a runner for your chosen CI/CD platform, a disk volume autoscaler (shameless plug I wrote this) etc. Learn to deploy Helm charts on it, and learn to deploy some of your services onto it, exposing them to the internet. Learn to install and use Prometheus and Grafana on it to get in-depth metrics and visualization. Learn how to use Prometheus Alertmanager to trigger alerts to your email, webhooks, slack, etc. There's a lot to learn, and it may feel intimidating, but get the ball rolling and incrementally improve/expand your experience.

References: I use docker and Kubernetes daily. I currently manage numerous clusters and maintain pipelines for hundreds of microservices as I type this. I've been converting microservices into Docker images for companies hundreds if not thousands of times by now over the last bunches of years. I am also an avid and passionate open-source evangelist and Kubernetes/DevOps consultant. I author some Kubernetes controllers such as the Volume Autoscaler and have a set of Open Source Helm Charts and I love to contribute code/fixes wherever I run into issues.

Old justifications for this were to resize drives but all major cloud providers support handling the resizing operation for you now. You still need to trigger the resize. But with a controller like the Kubernetes Volume Autoscaler you don’t even need to do that!

An new open-source Kubernetes controller, the Kubernetes Volume Autoscaler, which auto-resizes your Persistent Volumes when they get almost full

Kubernetes Volume Autoscaler - An Kubernetes Controller to automatically scale up volumes (disks). I just recently released an update based on some feedback, adding Prometheus metrics support and fixing a few bugs

Autoscale everything. There’s no over provisioning if it just provisions as needed. HPA and Cluster Autoscaler and for disks I wrote and use the Volume Autoscaler. Nodes disappear as needed and appear as needed. I generally even do spot instances in production. All assuming you are using a cloud provider.

Volume Autoscaler - Automatically scale up your disks size, keeping your costs low and allowing you to grow over time. Also making one less thing your sysops/devops person has to do. (Shameless plug, I wrote this)