helm VS crossplane

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.

did anyone adopt in production https://crossplane.io ?

- https://github.com/crossplane/crossplane/blob/master/design/one-pager-composition-environment.md

In the overall scheme of things , look at services like backstage.io , crossplane.io and opslevel.com to get ideas. This is not necessarily an endorsement of the services. If all you want is to handle cloud resources and that's it, Terraform can be enough with what ever flavor of web technologies you and your team are comfortable with and can support it along the way. Doesn't take much to create a js based website to collect data from a form, or use other means to collecting data as long as its recorded and transparent for accountability.

XRs are written in a fully declarative manner. And when I am building my XR from underlying managed resources provided by some crossplane provider I need to parametrize resources, use conditionals and create arrays of resuorces The issues of declarativeness in the world of automation are well known- we typically resort to some form of templating and we invent some imperative expressions into that templating language/format. This is currently not very well supported with Crossplane however Crossplane team realizes this issue and they are conteptualizing solution here

I have an idea for a project that would interface with Crossplane. The project has some code that would save tons of time if I could use it directly in my project, but it is located in the internal directory. I can't import the modules directly, but the project is open sourced under an Apache 2.0 license, so the code itself is available for use under that license.

There are always new projects like crossplane that sit on top on architecture systems like terraform, vagrant. The pressure to abstract away any sort of resources is mounting, companies can save a lot by for example by alt hosting S3 endpoints. The train is going the direction not to tie anything to a specific platform implementation if its not a must. Most of the companies I work with use AWS as a hosting provider, but Microsoft for github and related CI matters. As I learned, AWS quality is very dependent on location, eu-central-1 is dead stable for our use cases serving about millions requests a day.

Practically, you'll be replacing stock k8s resources (deployments) with custom ones like Argo Rollouts with Keda autoscaling, so you have to plan the respective Gitops CD pipeline (fluxcd/argocd with some crossplane), as well.