If you have been following the Codefresh blog for a while, you might have noticed a common pattern in all the articles that talk about Kubernetes deployments. Almost all of them start with a Kubernetes cluster that is already there, and then the article explains how to deploy an application on top. The reason for this simplification comes mainly from brevity and simplicity. We want to focus on the deployment part of the application and not its infrastructure just to make the article easier to follow.

Several companies nowadays offer a cloud-native solution that manages Kubernetes applications and services. While these solutions seem easy at first glance, in reality, they still require manual maintenance. As an example, an important decision for any Kubernetes cluster is the number of nodes and the autoscaling rules you define.

Have you always wanted to have different settings between production and staging but never knew how? You can do this with Kustomize! Kustomize is a CLI configuration manager for Kubernetes objects that leverage layering to preserve the base settings of the application. This is done by overlaying the declarative YAML artifacts to override default settings without actually making any changes to the original manifest.

Flux is a CNCF based open source stack of tools. Flux focuses on making it possible to keep Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native applications in sync with external resources and definitions hosted in environments such as GitHub. Implementing tools like FluxCD should enable you to achieve results such as: The results above can bring obvious benefits, and many teams are adopting FluxCD as their tool of choice for GitOps.

In a previous post, we talked about the increasing adoption of Platform Engineering teams. The post covered topics such as defining Platform Engineering and the roles and responsibilities of the team. When building an internal platform, a clear goal that many teams want to achieve is: Even though this is key to a successful platform team, this responsibility increases complexity, costs, support time, and more. Not to mention that this can be a long, very long journey.

Matt and I are out in Los Angeles this week for KubeCon 2021 this week. At the GitOpsCon event Tuesday we were excited to attend this Kubernetes session: GitOps in the Real World: Opportunities for Developer Experience Improvement.

Not to muddy the waters with one more prefix in front of ops, GitOps is a newer DevOps paradigm that slants towards the developer. As the names states, GitOps is focused around Git, the source code management tool. As a developer, leveraging an SCM is one of the quintessential tools of the trade; allowing for collaboration and more importantly saving your hard work off of your machine.

This is the first of many posts highlighting GitOps topics that we’ll be exploring. Within this post, we will explore Helm, a tool used for Kubernetes package management, that also provides templating. Helm provides utilities that assist Kubernetes application deployment. In order to better understand how Helm charts are mapped to Kubernetes manifests, we’ll explain more details below and how to use Helm with and without GitOps.