Redis Enterprise Release Using Helm Charts

by Vick Kelkar

Principal Product Manager

by Danni Moiseyev

Senior Software Engineer at Redis Labs.

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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:

1. Charts – Collections of files inside a directory used to create a Kubernetes application
2. Config – Contains configuration information used to create a releasable object
3. Release – A running instance of a Chart

Helm has two main components:

•      Client – Sends Charts to the server component for installation or upgrade of existing releases
•      Server – A component called tiller interacts with Kubernetes API server using gRPC

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?

•      You can download our Redis Enterprise Helm Charts here
•      You can download our Redis Enterprise Docker container image here
•      You can find the readme of our Helm Charts here

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.