kustomize VS Helm-Chart-Boilerplates

kustomize: brew install kustomize

It's a built in feature of kustomize https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/blob/master/api/types/helmchartargs.go

I think the combination of Kustomize and helm works in my experience. For advanced use cases, you can also see KRM functions in Kustomize.

See for instance a related issue: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/issues/3866

Using a strategic merge is the safest way so you avoid the index fragility.

Rendering out the manifests is something I have been pushing for. Not having to understand how every templating tool works and what actually is being changed is key. Though, it gets complicated when you use helm (or any templating/patching tool) that produces many variants. You also lose any release/deployment time hooks that are provided (helm hooks or recently "patched" kustomize env variables).

https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/blob/master/examples/chart.md (edit: oh I see the other commenter also included this link, oops)

Kustomize is an open-source project that “lets you customize raw, template-free YAML files for multiple purposes, leaving the original YAML untouched and usable as is.” It’s now the most popular tool for customizing Kubernetes manifests reasonably, and it’s even built directly into the Kubernetes CLI since K8s v1.14.

I would point you to what I call the "Universal Helm Charts" and some examples of how to use them.

Shameless Plug: Here's one of my dashboards I made for Ingress-Nginx, which is my recommended border router/gateway into all the services. It adds deep robust metrics and configurability, and if you've got years of experience with Nginx also, it allows you rich complex customization via nginx's configuration structure via kubernetes annotations. Besides that I have open-source helm charts which are easy to use, boilerplates showing how to use them, a volume autoscaler to automatically resize your disks as they get full, and a blog where I share various of my experience which is a companion blog to my upcoming book of the same name. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you have any further questions.

Here is an example of a repo that uses an sub-chart: https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-apache-with-configmap-template/deployment

Use multi-values files with helm ALWAYS. Allowing an env-specific overlay to tweak your default values files. See: https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-echoserver/deployment/boilerplate-echoserver

Helm charts - https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Universal-Kubernetes-Helm-Charts Example using helm charts as sub charts - https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-echoserver

Helm Chart Boilerplates are examples of usage of the above Universal Helm Charts to help people understand how to use them more, a stop-gap until I add more documentation

Helm Chart Usage Boilerplates (Examples of using these helm chart)

To help you on deploying your service, I've created open source generic/universal Helm Charts to make it easy to do the above. Here are the Universal Helm Charts and here's some boilerplate examples of using them. These built-in have support for HPAs, services, ingresses, etc, making it as easy as autoscaling.enable: true I haven't gotten around to documenting the helm charts yet, but there's lots of comments in the values.yaml file explaining everything.