skaffold VS helm

A nice middle ground is using a tool like Google's Skaffold, which provides "Bazel-like" capabilities for composing Docker images and tagging them based on a number of strategies, including file manifests. In my case, I also use build args to explicitly set versions of external dependencies.

While I am in a Typescript environment with this setup at the moment, my personal experience that Skaffold with Docker has a lighter implementation and maintenance overhead than Bazel. (You also get the added benefit of easy deployment and automatic rebuilds.)

I quite liked using Bazel in a small Golang monorepo, but I ran into pain when trying to do things like include third-party pre-compiled binaries in the Docker builds, because of the unusual build rules convention. The advantage of Skaffold is it provides a thin build/tag/deploy/verify layer over Docker and other container types. Might be worth a look!

Kudos to the Google team building it! https://skaffold.dev

To get a similar experience of preevy up, first we’ll need to split the build and deploy using process or alternatively employ tools that orchestrate build-tag-push-update-sync flow like Skaffold/Tilt.

We will be using docker and microk8s from Canonical. For running our software during development, we will be using skaffold which is a great tool developed by Google.

To add more context, if you are developing containers in a local dev environment, the minimum you should have is the Google Cloud SDK and Skaffold. The SDK will allow you to programmatically interact with Googleapis e.g. auth, services, resources. Skaffold will allow you to build and deploy to the cloud similar to working with a local dev environment.

I have used both Skaffold and Devspace. I prefer the latter.

I wonder if it has some overlap with https://skaffold.dev/.

K3d and Skaffold for local development

skaffold.dev - build in k8s - no more asking for the database password. All the plumbing to the backend is just done so it's easier for them to test and demo any branch

What is Helm

Pro Tip: Use Helm charts to manage Kubernetes configurations and deployments more efficiently.

Helm

In this lab, we deploy kube-ops-view via *Helm *. Helm is a tool for managing Kubernetes charts, which means a preconfigured Kubernetes resource package. The purpose of managing charts with Helm is to manage various manifest files easily.

You might want to choose a different name and branding. [Helm](https://helm.sh/) is already a package manager for Kubernetes with pretty similar branding.

Download page: https://github.com/helm/helm/releases

I don't plan on covering Helm here as I think it adds complexity over already quite complex K8s manifests. Surely it might be useful for large-scale stuff, but let's keep things simple here. I have combined knowledge from the articles with the updated charts in order to created a trimmed-down version of the required manifests (it would be good to add liveliness and readiness probes though):

Migrating all my Kubernetes files to Helm would be a good idea as well.

A Helm Chart is a collection of templates and settings that describe a set of Kubernetes resources.

Today, we will continue our journey with Nuke by adding new targets to the solution presented in Nuke: Deploy ASP.NET Web App to Azure. This time, we will deploy our application to a local Kubernetes cluster using Helm.