krew VS helm

Authenticating with Kyma is a (in my opinion) unnecessary challenge as it leverages the OIDC-login plugin for kubectl. You find a description of the setup here. This works fine when on a Mac but can give you some headaches on a Windows and on Linux machine especially when combined with restrictive setups in corporate environments. For Windows I can only recommend installing krew via chocolatey and then install the OIDC plugin via kubectl krew install oidc-login. At least for me that was the only way to get this working on Windows.

( set -x; cd "$(mktemp -d)" && OS="$(uname | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')" && ARCH="$(uname -m | sed -e 's/x86_64/amd64/' -e 's/\(arm\)\(64\)\?.*/\1\2/' -e 's/aarch64$/arm64/')" && KREW="krew-${OS}_${ARCH}" && curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/krew/releases/download/v0.4.4/krew-linux_amd64.tar.gz" && tar zxvf "${KREW}.tar.gz" && ./"${KREW}" install krew )

Krew is a way to manage plugins for Kubernetes. For more info, check out the following link: https://krew.sigs.k8s.io/

I plan on getting it added as a krew plugin, so watch this space.

Krew is a plugin manager maintained by the Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) CLI community. Krew makes it easy to use kubectl plugins and helps you discover, install, and manage them on your machine. It is similar to tools like apt, dnf, or brew. Today, over 200 kubectl plugins are available on Krew - and that number is only increasing. Some projects are actively used and some get deprecated over time, but are still accessible via Krew.

kubectl plugins can be installed in numerous ways, the easiest way would be to install the official plugin manager called krew.

( set -x; cd "$(mktemp -d)" && OS="$(uname | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')" && ARCH="$(uname -m | sed -e 's/x86_64/amd64/' -e 's/\(arm\)\(64\)\?.*/\1\2/' -e 's/aarch64$/arm64/')" && KREW="krew-${OS}_${ARCH}" && curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/krew/releases/latest/download/${KREW}.tar.gz" && tar zxvf "${KREW}.tar.gz" && ./"${KREW}" install krew )

-- What is Krew?

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.