tofu-controller VS helm

We stumbled upon a project for maintaining Terraform with CRDs that we could deploy with Helm. That project is now called Tofu-Controller - another WeaveWorks project, so it integrated great with our existing Flux setup.

https://github.com/weaveworks/tf-controller/issues/1166#issu...

Weave's TF-Controller, which also has fewer bugs, much better adoption, and it looks like it's actually being developed by someone. But requires a weird argocd <-> flux interop boilerplate. It's a "controller for flux" and not a Kubernetes controller, and I don't really get such ambiguous targeting , but meh...

Wrt tools, I wanted to integrate terraform with Flux thanks to their tf-controller. Conciling the core gitops features with terraform would be great imho.

I'm using Flux instead of Argo which has support for running terraform from a given Git Repo or OCI artifact so essentially I still fall back on Terraform when needed and it's applied via GitOps.

tf-controller which is integrated with Flux GitOps and reconciles Terraform files in a control loop

While searching for alternatives for running Terraform using Kubernetes, I found several controllers and operators, but none that I felt had as much potential as the tf-controller from Weaveworks. We are already using Flux as our GitOps tool, and the tf-controller works by utilizing some of the core functionality from Flux, and has a custom resource for Terraform deployments. The source controller takes care of fetching our modules, the kustomize controllers apply the Terraform resources, and then the controller spin up static pods (called runners) that runs your Terraform commands.

For us, GitOps is a vital part of how we operate, and it is the magic sauce that fuels our platform offering. Not only do we use it for application deployments, but by utilizing the Weaveworks tf-controller, we can create services using Terraform to automate our infrastructure deployments.

Some further research brought me to Weaveworks' TF-Controller which appears to be able to do what I want at least for the initial deployment step. Flux CD (also by Weaveworks) integrates with KEDA now, so it would be great if it could also integrate with KEDA to manage terraform-deployed Azure resources.

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.