helm VS Packer

Within the architecture of Cyclops, a central component is the Helm engine, which allows the dynamic generation of configurations. This engine serves as a key mechanism for efficiently managing settings and parameters in the Cyclops framework.

I know naming things is hard, but Helm has been in use as a tool in the Kubernetes ecosystem for years now.

https://helm.sh/

Helm is a widely used package manager for Kubernetes, designed to simplify and automate the deployment, scaling, and management of applications. It provides an efficient way to define, install, and upgrade even complex Kubernetes applications.

The choice of a winner depends on the specific requirements, priorities, and constraints of the organization or system you're working with. Sigstore is well-suited for organizations prioritizing secure and transparent software updates for various artifacts, including Helm charts, alongside images. It has great community support and features, such as interoperability between registries, making it a great choice for most organizations. Moreover, most container registries support the signing format.

The first thing we need to do is decide on how we want to package and manage Kubernetes manifests for different environments. There's a tool called Helm which @StevenMurawski covered here, and another tool called Kustomize which I personally like to use. Both tools are great for packaging and managing Kubernetes manifests and also supported by FluxCD, but I prefer Kustomize because it is pretty easy to use and built into kubectl.

Helm Dashboard is an open-source project by Komodor that offers a visual and user-friendly way to manage and visualize all the Helm charts installed in your clusters. Instead of using the terminal, you can leverage the Helm Dashboard's intuitive UI to perform a variety of tasks that make working with Helm a breeze. Here are some of its key features:

Next, we will install APIClarity using Helm.

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm is an open-source project originally created by DeisLabs and donated to the Cloud Native Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF now maintains and has graduated the project. This means that it is mature and not just a fad.

For CLI utilities written in Go, Cobra is the go-to command line wrapper, used by the likes of Kubernetes, Github CLI, Helm, and many more.

Server templating: Using Packer has never been easier to create reusable server configurations in a platform-independent and documented manner.

HashiCorp Packer is a tool for creating machine images for a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and VMware. It allows you to define machine images as code and supports a wide range of configuration options.

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

However, I was unable to build the boxes with packer for some reason. It turned out that this wasn't an easy to fix or obvious issue. In fact, I had to search quite hard to find an answer. I am pretty sure my friend Tim Hall (oracle-base) ran into this issue too. Finally, I found a description of the issue on packer GitHub: Packer 1.8.4 not working with Virtualbox 7.0.4+ #12118.

I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.

Packer. https://github.com/hashicorp/packer

For an AMI build pipeline, have a look at Hashicorp Packer and Ansible if a host is long lived

Heh, I've been messing more with Nomad & Packer than k8s for my own stuff, I'll say guilty for Ansible though it's useful on its own and with Packer.