cloudwithchris.com VS helm

Navigate to a GitHub Repository that you own. For example, I am the organization owner of CloudWithChris, so will navigate to my cloudwithchris.com repository.

For example, the website you're reading (Cloud With Chris) is - and has been - hosted using the Static Websites on Azure Storage approach since March 2020. As an end-user, when you navigate to www.cloudwithchris.com, you'll be routed to an Azure CDN instance that is fronting the Azure Storage Account which hosts the production Static Website. The CDN is how I'm able to have an SSL Certificate mapped against a Custom Domain, otherwise that wouldn't be possible directly on the storage account (as there's no way to map a custom SSL certificate in that way directly).

So, what's the point in this post (other than reinforcing a brilliant episode, thank you again Annie)? Over time, I'll release a set of blog posts which cover these CNCF projects. I don't have a timeframe. I don't have a specific goal in mind just yet. But given that it's Cloud with Chris, it does feel that Cloud native should have a spot in there somewhere. So stay tuned! If you'd like me to focus on any projects in particular, please let me know either in the Cloud With Chris GitHub repository by raising a GitHub Issue, or letting me know on Twitter, @reddobowen.

Now, one of the main points that I raise in my usual talk on hosting websites using the Static Content Hosting pattern is the significant cost-benefit of doing this. In an average month, I spend less than £5 for the entire end-to-end running of my environments. Yes, environments plural - that includes Preview, Staging and production, and also includes the cost of streaming my audio files to third party platforms like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and consumed directly from www.cloudwithchris.com.

There are plenty of existing articles that talk about how to optimise these common SEO practices, so I recommend you search for these as I'm going to aim to not reinvent the wheel. If you're interested on how I achieve some of these in Cloud with Chris, you can take a look at the metadata partial template that I use within my Hugo template.

name: "Podcast Audio Upload" on: push: branches: - master paths: - "podcast_audio/**" jobs: publish: environment: name: production.azure url: https://www.cloudwithchris.com runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Download Podcast files that are different from prior commit run: | git clone --config lfs.fetchexclude="/podcast_audio" https://github.com/chrisreddington/cloudwithchris.com.git ./ fileschanged=$(git diff --name-only HEAD^ HEAD -- '*.mp3') echo "$fileschanged" > files.txt xargs -a files.txt -d'\n' rm git config --unset lfs.fetchexclude git checkout . cd podcast_audio sed -i -e 's/podcast_audio\///g' ../files.txt for i in *; do if ! grep -qxFe "$i" ../files.txt then echo "Deleting: $i" rm "$i" fi done - name: Azure Login uses: azure/login@v1 with: creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }} - name: "Upload podcast files to storage that don't yet exist" uses: azure/CLI@v1 with: azcliversion: 2.20.0 inlineScript: | az storage blob upload-batch --account-name cloudwithchrisprod -d 'podcasts' -s '/github/workspace/podcast_audio' --if-unmodified-since 2020-01-01T00:00Z --auth-mode login

Once you have added the Public GPG Key details to GitHub, you can now go ahead and push your local changes to GitHub by using git push (If you haven't already associated a remote location with the Git repository, then you may also need to use the git remote add command, and then use git push). Assuming that the Public Key in the GPG Keys section of your GitHub account corresponds with the Private Key used to sign the commits, then you will notice that commits will be marked as verified in the GitHub user interface. See the example below from the cloudwithchris.com Git Repository Commits page.

Similarly, Cloud With Chris is an example of a JAMStack site, driven by Hugo, a static website generator. Rather than calling any backend APIs, the content is all entirely driven by markdown which is hosted in the GitHub repository mentioned a moment ago. This means I'm not calling any external APIs. Instead, the content is finalised at deployment time. I run a command in my GitHub Actions (Hugo build) which goes ahead and takes my site's configuration, necessary theme information and content, and renders the needed files to generate the set of webpages to render to my clients. The content is then uploaded to an Azure Blob Storage account which is publicly accessible and configured using the Static Website functionality.

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!

Helm is a package manager that automates Kubernetes applications' creation, packaging, configuration, and deployment by combining your configuration files into a single reusable package. This eliminates the requirement to create the mentioned Kubernetes resources by ourselves since they have been implemented within the Helm chart. All we need to do is configure it as needed to match our requirements. From the public Helm chart repository, we can get the charts for common software packages like Consul, Jenkins SonarQube, etc. We can also create our own Helm charts for our custom applications so that we don’t need to repeat ourselves and simplify deployments.

We can search for charts https://helm.sh/ . Charts can be pulled(downloaded) and optionally unpacked(untar).

Generally I felt as if I was diving in the deepest of waters without the correct equipement and that was horrifying. Unfortunately to me, I had to dive even deeper before getting equiped with tools like ArgoCD, and k8slens. I had to start working with... HELM.

Within the architecture of Cyclops, a central component is the Helm engine. Helm is very popular within the Kubernetes community; chances are you have already run into it. The popularity of Helm plays to Cyclops's strength because of its straightforward integration.