apisix-docker VS helm

This project leverages existing the pre-defined Docker Compose configuration file to set up, deploy, and run APISIX, etcd, Prometheus, and other services with a single command. First, clone the apisix-docker repo on GitHub, open it in your favorite editor, navigate to the example folder, and start the project by simply running docker compose up command in a terminal from the project root folder.

We will leverage the existing file-proxy demo project on GitHub. It has a quite similar structure to the existing Apisix docker example repo, only we removed unnecessary files to keep the demo simple. The project has 3 folders, docker-compose.yml, and sample openapi.yaml files.

git clone https://github.com/apache/apisix-docker.git

This first thing you clone the apisix-docker project repo from GitHub:

Apache APISIX Apache APISIX is an open source, dynamic, real-time, high-performance cloud native API gateway. APISIX provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more. Official website https://apisix.apache.org/ GitHub projects APISIX (the core): https://github.com/apache/apisix GitHub - apache/apisix: The Cloud-Native API Gateway GitHub - apache/apisix-dashboard: Dashboard for Apache APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-website: Apache APISIX Website GitHub - apache/apisix-docker: the docker for Apache APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-go-plugin-runner: Go Plugin Runner for APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner: APISIX Plugin Runner in Java GitHub - apache/apisix-python-plugin-runner: Apache APISIX Python plugin runner GitHub - apache/apisix-helm-chart: Apache APISIX Helm Chart GitHub - apache/apisix-ingress-controller: ingress controller for K8s

We made use of Apache APISIX docker compose repo where we deployed several components in one run and we demonstrated how the API Gateway can be used to manage sample ASP.NET Core application to retrieve product data using Product microservice's API. Also, you learned how to enable limit-count plugin for the API endpoint. There are many other built-in plugins available in Apache APISIX, you can check them on Plugin Hub page. Basically, APISIX can be a lightweight middleware API Gateway regardless of which programming language, frameworks, tools, or platforms you are developing a microservice or application.

In this demo, we are using Apache APISIX Docker repo and it contains an example docker-compose.yaml file and with other config files that makes straightforward to start APISIX using docker compose. We try out this example:

APISIX uses etcd to save and synchronize configuration. Before installing APISIX, you need to install etcd on your machine. It would be installed automatically if you choose the Apache APISIX Docker compose mode, you will learn more about on the next blog post Use Docker Compose to deploy containerized APISIX to AWS ECS.

The apisix-security-java-spring project makes use of the similar example APISIX docker compose template.

✔️ Create an Azure resource group. ✔️ Configure Azure Container Instances. ✔️ Create a Azure context for Docker to offload Apisix and etcd containers execution to ACI. ✔️ Get Apache APISIX example source code for Docker from GitHub. ✔️ Modify Docker compose file there. ✔️ Setup volumes in Azure Storage Account with Azure File Share. ✔️ Add APISIX config files to Azure File Share. ✔️ Bring up APISIX in Azure Container Instances. ✔️ Verify APISIX running. ✔️ Cleanup after you finish.

Helm is a Kubernetes package management solution. It allows you to bundle your Kubernetes manifests as reusable units called charts. You can then install charts in your clusters to easily manage versioned releases and ensure that app dependencies are available.

The fire continued to blaze onward. We created SIGs - Special Interest Groups - to gather people weekly or bi-weekly to discuss specific areas of interest. I co-created and co-led SIG-Apps. My interest was figuring out how to make it easy to build, install and manage applications in Kubernetes and the tools we needed on top of Kubernetes. I contributed to Helm and Draft in particular around this time as there was a surge of tools in the space. More and more people gathered and discussed and demo’ed and proposed. More processes and automation bots appeared.

Step-1:  Install CloudNativePG operator on your running Kubernetes, best way to deploy using Helm.

Kubernetes Documentation: https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/ Kubernetes Tutorials: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/ Kubernetes Community: https://kubernetes.io/community/ Prometheus: https://prometheus.io/ Grafana: https://grafana.com/ Elasticsearch: https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/ Kibana: https://www.elastic.co/kibana Helm: https://helm.sh/ Prometheus Helm Chart: https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/prometheus Grafana Helm Chart: https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/grafana Elasticsearch Helm Chart: https://github.com/elastic/helm-charts/tree/main/elasticsearch Kibana Helm Chart: https://github.com/elastic/helm-charts/tree/main/kibana RBAC: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/rbac/ Network Policies: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/network-policies/ StatefulSets: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/statefulset/ DaemonSets: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/daemonset/ Taints and Tolerations: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/taint-and-toleration/ Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs): https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/extend-kubernetes/api-extension/custom-resources/ Operators: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/extend-kubernetes/operator/

Applying Kubernetes manifests individually is problematic because files can get overlooked. Packaging your applications as Helm charts lets you version your manifests and easily repeat deployments into different environments. Helm tracks the state of each deployment as a "release" in your cluster.

helm

Explanation here: https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/12681#issuecomment-19593...

Looks like it's a bug in Helm, but actually isn't Helm's fault, the issue was introduced by Fedora Linux.

Helm (Get from here https://helm.sh/)

It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.

Kubernetes orchestrates deployments and manages resources through yaml configuration files. While Kubernetes supports a wide array of resources and configurations, our aim in this tutorial is to maintain simplicity. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, we will use yaml configurations with hardcoded values. This method simplifies the learning process but isn’t ideal for production environments due to the need for manual updates with each new deployment. Although there are methods to streamline and automate this process, such as using Helm charts or bash scripts, we’ll not delve into those techniques to keep the tutorial manageable and avoid fatigue — you might be quite tired by that point!