helm VS flux2

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.

Given the team had already adopted GitOps and were familiar with deployments powered by Helm Releases and Flux, we wanted to move the provisioning of the infrastructure to be part of the same process of creating the service and its continuous deployment.

Your GitHub action can trigger a helm chart, or series thereof, or other infra tools. Declarative specifications, triggered procedurally with the context of the branch’s latest build. We use this pattern quite extensively for preview app workflows.

As of a year ago this is possible in a fully declarative way with Flux 2, but there’s a lot more moving parts and security footguns - and the idea that the maintenance of this project has lost one of its primary sponsors is worrying at best.

https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/831

https://blog.kluctl.io/introducing-the-template-controller-a...

FluxCD - FluxCD is another popular GitOps tool that allows developers to use a Git repository as the sole source of configuration. Flux automatically ensures that the state of the Kubernetes cluster is synchronized with the configuration in the Git repository. It supports automatic updates, meaning Flux can monitor Docker image repositories for new images and push updates to the cluster.

#!/bin/bash aws eks update-kubeconfig --name $CLUSTER_NAME --region $AWS_REGION flux_installed=$(kubectl api-resources | grep flux) if [ -z "$flux_installed" ]; then echo "flux is not installed" curl -s https://fluxcd.io/install.sh | sudo bash flux bootstrap github \ --owner=$GH_USER_NAME \ --repository=$FLUX_REPO_NAME \ --path="clusters/$ENVIRONMENT/$CLUSTER_NAME/bootstrap" \ --branch=main \ --personal else echo "flux is installed" fi

Flux CD enables continuous deployment to Kubernetes through GitOps by syncing Git repositories with Kubernetes clusters. Flux CD enables GitOps for Kubernetes through source control integration. It manages Kubernetes manifests as code and syncs git repo changes to clusters. Flux automates checks, deployments, and updates within clusters.

FluxCD is a GitOps tool developed by Weaveworks that allows you to implement continuous and progressive delivery of your applications on Kubernetes. It is a CNCF graduated project that offers a set of controllers to monitor Git repositories and reconciles the cluster's actual state with the desired state defined by manifests committed in the repo.

From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker).

Instead, we will create a single long-lived cluster, and deploy our application in different namespaces. There are a bunch of ways to do that - see ArgoCD, Flux, custom internal tooling, or other solutions (we use our own product). That way, we:

One is to make sure configurations in both clusters is same. And for that there are many tools like fluxcd or projectsveltos