An Introduction to the Helm Tool
Helm is a tool that makes the installation and management of Kubernetes applications efficient. Helm helps you manage Kubernetes Charts. Charts are a collection of information and files needed to create an instance of a running Kubernetes application. There are three main concepts in Helm:
Helm has two main components:
Why you need Helm Charts
The manual deployment of the Kubernetes application, which may have many resources, can be prone to errors such as failure to deploy a resource or typing a wrong input when issuing the `kubectl` command(s). You can avoid these problems by automating the steps in a script. However, the problem with the home-grown automation script is that the logic of the script cannot be easily transferred to a Kubernetes cluster.
Introducing the Redis Enterprise Kubernetes Release
Redis labs, home of Redis, has been working on a Kubernetes-based deployment of Redis Enterprise for the last few months. We have written our own Kubernetes controller which deploys a Redis Enterprise database service on a Kubernetes cluster. The Redis Enterprise release is made up of many Kubernetes resources, such as service, deployment, StatefulSet and Kubernetes secrets.
How Helm Charts improve the Redis Enterprise Kubernetes Release
During the beta period of the product development, we used to deploy all the required Kubernetes resources manually, which was error prone. Synchronizing yaml files between Kubernetes clusters, managing configuration versions started to become a challenge. Helm Charts allow us to deploy the Redis Enterprise service using a single command to a Kubernetes namespace of your choice:
helm install --namespace redis -n 'production' ./redis-enterprise
How do you get started?
It’s really that simple!
What’s next?
If you would like to start experimenting with our Kubernetes generally available release, please contact expert@redis.com so that we can help you with your Redis needs.