helm-charts VS tanka

The go to solution for a k8s monitoring setup is https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/mai...

That's why Kube-Prometheus-Stack was created. It installs a collection of Kubernetes manifests, Grafana dashboards, and Prometheus rules, providing an easy-to-operate, end-to-end Kubernetes cluster monitoring solution with Prometheus using the Prometheus Operator.

Step 1: Installing Kube-prometheus-stack

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/

Installation example for prometheus:

Prometheus can be deployed using the Prometheus Helm Chart. This helm chart contains a lot of features such as the already mentioned Push Gateway, Alert Manager and so on. For simplicity reasons of this tutorial I will not show all the Helm chart configuration but you can see a real example used by me here.

Building upon Bartłomiej Płotka's insightful blog on Prometheus and its passthrough agent mode, this post dives into implementing multi-cluster Prometheus support. Notably, the official inclusion of support in the widely-used kube-prometheus-stack came with the release in July 2023, making it easier to extend Prometheus monitoring across clusters.

The first thing you'll need, of course, is at least one backend to store metrics. So install Prometheus now:

I would recommend implementing a similar API to Grafana Tanka: https://tanka.dev

When you "synthesise", the returned value should be an array or an object.

1. If it's an object, check if it has an `apiVersion` and `kind` key. If it does, yield that as a kubernetes object and do not recurse.

Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).

Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/

A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet

- validation is often impractical (at least identifying exactly where the error is… I’m looking at you Helm!)

Unrelated to OP, but you can leverage Tanka to extend helm charts with functionality not provided by upstream.

https://tanka.dev/

Although jsonette might be considered more complex Tanka is a great alternative for k8s config management.

At Grafana Labs we're using jsonnet at scale, while being a powerful functional language it is also excellent for rendering JSON/YAML config. We have developed Tanka[0] to work with Kubernetes, for other purposes I can recommend this course[1] (authored by me).

[0] https://tanka.dev/

[1] https://jsonnet-libs.github.io/jsonnet-training-course/

If you're hitting the limits of Kustomize, maybe look at Tanka as well.

Yes, try Tanka.

yes. basically. and this is a path that multiple people are trying to solve. e.g. AWS CDK8s, https://tanka.dev/, etc

Compose would be awesome.

http://tanka.dev

(Note I work for Grafana Labs who fund Tanka and use it for all production config)