Helm chart deployment ordering - kubernetes

I created a new chart with 2 podPresets and 2 deployments and when I go to run helm install the deployment(pod) object is created first and then podPresets hence my values from podPreset are not applied to the pods, but when I manually create podPreset first and then deployment the presets are applied properly, Is there a way I can specify in helm as to which object should be created first.

Posting this as Community Wiki for better visibility as answer was provided in comments below another answer made by #Rastko.
PodPresents
A Pod Preset is an API resource for injecting additional runtime
requirements into a Pod at creation time. Using a Pod Preset allows
pod template authors to not have to explicitly provide all information
for every pod. This way, authors of pod templates consuming a specific
service do not need to know all the details about that service.
For more information, please check official docs.
Order of deploying objects in Helm
Order of deploying is hardcoded in Helm. List can be found here.
In addition, if resource is not in the list it will be executed as last one.
Answer to question from comments*
Answer to your question - To achieve order different then default one, you can create two helm charts in which one with deployments is executed afterwards with preinstall hook making sure that presets are there.
Pre-install hook annotation allows to execute after templates are rendered, but before any resources are created.
This workaround was mentioned on Github thread. Example for service:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: foo
annotations:
"helm.sh/hook": "pre-install"
As additional information, there is possibility to define weight for a hook which will help build a deterministic executing order.
annotations:
"helm.sh/hook-weight": "5"
For more details regarding this annotation, please check this Stackoverflow qustion.

Since you are using Helm charts and have full control of this part, why not make optional parts in your helm charts that you can activate with an external value?
This would be a lot more "Helm native" way:
{{- if eq .Values.prodSecret "enabled"}}
- name: prod_db_password
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: prod_db_password
key: password
{{- end}}
Then you just need to add --set prodSecret=enabled when executing your Helm chart.

Related

Kubernetes - Reconfiguring a Service to point to a new Deployment (blue/green)

I'm following along with a video explaining blue/green Deployments in Kubernetes. They have a simple example with a Deployment named blue-nginx and another named green-nginx.
The blue Deployment is exposed via a Service named bgnginx. To transfer traffic from the blue deployment to the green deployment, the Service is deleted and the green deployment is exposed via a Service with the same name. This is done with the following one-liner:
kubectl delete svc bgnginx; kubectl expose deploy green-nginx --port=80 --name=bgnginx
Obviously, this works successfully. However, I'm wondering why they don't just use kubectl edit to change the labels in the Service instead of deleting and recreating it. If I edit bgnginx and set .metadata.labels.app & .spec.selector.app to green-nginx it achieves the same thing.
Is there a benefit to deleting and recreating the Service, or am I safe just editing it?
Yes, you can follow the kubectl edit svc and edit the labels & selector there.
it's fine, however YAML and other option is suggested due to kubectl edit is error-prone approach. you might face indentation issues.
Is there a benefit to deleting and recreating the Service, or am I
safe just editing it?
It's more about following best practices, and you have YAML declarative file handy with version control if managing.
The problem with kubectl edit is that it requires a human to operate a text editor. This is a little inefficient and things do occasionally go wrong.
I suspect the reason your writeup wants you to kubectl delete the Service first is that the kubectl expose command will fail if it already exists. But as #HarshManvar suggests in their answer, a better approach is to have an actual YAML file checked into source control
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: myapp
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: myapp
spec:
selector:
app.kubernetes.io/name: myapp
example.com/deployment: blue
You should be able to kubectl apply -f service.yaml to deploy it into the cluster, or a tool can do that automatically.
The problem here is that you still have to edit the YAML file (or in principle you can do it with sed) and swapping the deployment would result in an extra commit. You can use a tool like Helm that supports an extra templating layer
spec:
selector:
app.kubernetes.io/name: myapp
example.com/deployment: {{ .Values.color }}
In Helm I might set this up with three separate Helm releases: the "blue" and "green" copies of your application, plus a separate top-level release that just contained the Service.
helm install myapp-blue ./myapp
# do some isolated validation
helm upgrade myapp-router ./router --set color=blue
# do some more validation
helm uninstall myapp-green
You can do similar things with other templating tools like ytt or overlay layers like Kustomize. The Service's selectors: don't have to match its own metadata, and you could create a Service that matched both copies of the application, maybe for a canary pattern rather than a blue/green deployment.

How to easily duplicate helm charts

10 microservices on kubernetes with helm3 charts, and saw that all of them have similar structure standard, deployment, service, hpa, network policies etc. and basically the <helm_chart_name>/templates directory is 99% same on all with some if statements on top of file whether we want to deploy that resource,
{{ if .Values.hpa.create }}
apiVersion: autoscaling/v1
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
name: {{ .Values.deployment.name }}
...
spec:
scaleTargetRef:
...
{{ end }}
and in values passing yes/no whether we want it - Is there some tool to easily create template for the helm charts ? To create Helm chart with this 5 manifests pre-populated with the reference to values as above ?
What you need is the Library Charts:
A library chart is a type of Helm chart that defines chart primitives
or definitions which can be shared by Helm templates in other charts.
This allows users to share snippets of code that can be re-used across
charts, avoiding repetition and keeping charts DRY.
You can find more details and examples in the linked documentation.
I think closest thing to the thing I want is https://helm.sh/docs/topics/library_charts/

Helm install in specific order for "deployment" [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Helm install in certain order
(2 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I am trying to create a Helm chart (x) with 5 deployments within chart (x) in a specific order:
Deployment 1 ( zk)
Deployment 2 (security)
Deployment 3 (localmaster)
Deployment 4 (nginx)
Deployment 5 (semoss)
Helm/Tiller version: "v2.12.3"
Kubectl version: Major:"1", Minor:"17"
Minikube version: v1.6.2
What I currently have:
RESOURCES:
==> v1/Deployment
NAME
Localmaster
Nginx
Security
Semoss
Zk
I can easily deploy chart (x) but once I run helm ls, my (x) chart is in a random order as you can see above. I only have one chart name (x) and within (x) I have:
Chart.yaml charts templates values.yaml
Templates and charts are directories and the rest are files.
Is there a specific way or trick to have my x (chart) in the order I want? I’ve done some research and I am not so sure if helm spray in the right call as I am trying to deploy 1 chart with different deployment as opposed to an umbrella chart, and many other sub-charts.
Let me know if you need more info.
Helm is package manager, allows you to define applications as a set of components on your cluster, and provides mechanisms to manage those sets from start to end.
Helm itself its not creating pods, it send requests to Kubernetes api and then Kubernetes is creating everything.
I have one idea how it can be achieve using Helm.
Helm order of deploying Kinds is hardcoded here. However if you want to set deploying order of the same kind to k8s, it can be done using annotations.
You could set annotations: Pre-install hook with hook-weight like in this example (lower value in hook-weight have higher priority). Similar case can be found on Github.
It would look like example below:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
annotations:
helm.sh/hook: pre-install
helm.sh/hook-weight: "10"
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/instance: test
...
You can check which deployment was created first using kubectl get events. However, creation of pods is still scheduled by Kubernetes.
To obtain exactly what you need you can use initContainers and hardcode "sleep" command. First deployment with sleep 1s, second deployment with 5s, third with 10s, depends how long deployment need to create all pods.
You can check this article, but keep in mind spec.containers and spec.initContainers are two different things.

Best way to DRY up deployments that all depend on a very similar init-container

I have 10 applications to deploy to Kubernetes. Each of the deployments depends on an init container that is basically identical except for a single parameter (and it doesn't make conceptual sense for me to decouple this init container from the application). So far I've been copy-pasting this init container into each deployment.yaml file, but I feel like that's got to be a better way of doing this!
I haven't seen a great solution from my research, though the only thing I can think of so far is to use something like Helm to package up the init container and deploy it as part of some dependency-based way (Argo?).
Has anyone else with this issue found a solution they were satisfied with?
A Helm template can contain an arbitrary amount of text, just so long as when all of the macros are expanded it produces a valid YAML Kubernetes manifest. ("Valid YAML" is trickier than it sounds because the indentation matters.)
The simplest way to do this would be to write a shared Helm template that included the definition for the init container:
_init_container.tpl:
{{- define "common.myinit" -}}
name: myinit
image: myname/myinit:{{ .Values.initTag }}
# Other things from a container spec
{{ end -}}
Then in your deployment, include this:
deployment.yaml:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Deployment
spec:
template:
spec:
initContainers:
- {{ include "common.myinit" . | indent 10 | strip }}
Then you can copy the _init_container.tpl file into each of your individual services.
If you want to avoid the copy-and-paste (reasonable enough) you can create a Helm chart that contains only templates and no actual Kubernetes resources. You need to set up some sort of repository to hold this chart. Put the _init_container.tpl into that shared chart, declare it as a dependency is the chart metadata, and reference the template in your deployment YAML in the same way (Go template names are shared across all included charts).

Restart pods when configmap updates in Kubernetes?

How do I automatically restart Kubernetes pods and pods associated with deployments when their configmap is changed/updated?
I know there's been talk about the ability to automatically restart pods when a config maps changes but to my knowledge this is not yet available in Kubernetes 1.2.
So what (I think) I'd like to do is a "rolling restart" of the deployment resource associated with the pods consuming the config map. Is it possible, and if so how, to force a rolling restart of a deployment in Kubernetes without changing anything in the actual template? Is this currently the best way to do it or is there a better option?
The current best solution to this problem (referenced deep in https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/22368 linked in the sibling answer) is to use Deployments, and consider your ConfigMaps to be immutable.
When you want to change your config, create a new ConfigMap with the changes you want to make, and point your deployment at the new ConfigMap. If the new config is broken, the Deployment will refuse to scale down your working ReplicaSet. If the new config works, then your old ReplicaSet will be scaled to 0 replicas and deleted, and new pods will be started with the new config.
Not quite as quick as just editing the ConfigMap in place, but much safer.
Signalling a pod on config map update is a feature in the works (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/22368).
You can always write a custom pid1 that notices the confimap has changed and restarts your app.
You can also eg: mount the same config map in 2 containers, expose a http health check in the second container that fails if the hash of config map contents changes, and shove that as the liveness probe of the first container (because containers in a pod share the same network namespace). The kubelet will restart your first container for you when the probe fails.
Of course if you don't care about which nodes the pods are on, you can simply delete them and the replication controller will "restart" them for you.
The best way I've found to do it is run Reloader
It allows you to define configmaps or secrets to watch, when they get updated, a rolling update of your deployment is performed. Here's an example:
You have a deployment foo and a ConfigMap called foo-configmap. You want to roll the pods of the deployment every time the configmap is changed. You need to run Reloader with:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stakater/Reloader/master/deployments/kubernetes/reloader.yaml
Then specify this annotation in your deployment:
kind: Deployment
metadata:
annotations:
configmap.reloader.stakater.com/reload: "foo-configmap"
name: foo
...
Helm 3 doc page
Often times configmaps or secrets are injected as configuration files in containers. Depending on the application a restart may be required should those be updated with a subsequent helm upgrade, but if the deployment spec itself didn't change the application keeps running with the old configuration resulting in an inconsistent deployment.
The sha256sum function can be used together with the include function to ensure a deployments template section is updated if another spec changes:
kind: Deployment
spec:
template:
metadata:
annotations:
checksum/config: {{ include (print $.Template.BasePath "/secret.yaml") . | sha256sum }}
[...]
In my case, for some reasons, $.Template.BasePath didn't work but $.Chart.Name does:
spec:
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: admin-app
annotations:
checksum/config: {{ include (print $.Chart.Name "/templates/" $.Chart.Name "-configmap.yaml") . | sha256sum }}
You can update a metadata annotation that is not relevant for your deployment. it will trigger a rolling-update
for example:
spec:
template:
metadata:
annotations:
configmap-version: 1
If k8>1.15; then doing a rollout restart worked best for me as part of CI/CD with App configuration path hooked up with a volume-mount. A reloader plugin or setting restartPolicy: Always in deployment manifest YML did not work for me. No application code changes needed, worked for both static assets as well as Microservice.
kubectl rollout restart deployment/<deploymentName> -n <namespace>
Had this problem where the Deployment was in a sub-chart and the values controlling it were in the parent chart's values file. This is what we used to trigger restart:
spec:
template:
metadata:
annotations:
checksum/config: {{ tpl (toYaml .Values) . | sha256sum }}
Obviously this will trigger restart on any value change but it works for our situation. What was originally in the child chart would only work if the config.yaml in the child chart itself changed:
checksum/config: {{ include (print $.Template.BasePath "/config.yaml") . | sha256sum }}
Consider using kustomize (or kubectl apply -k) and then leveraging it's powerful configMapGenerator feature. For example, from: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/kustomization/configmapgenerator/
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
# Just one example of many...
- name: my-app-config
literals:
- JAVA_HOME=/opt/java/jdk
- JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-agentlib:hprof
# Explanation below...
- SECRETS_VERSION=1
Then simply reference my-app-config in your deployments. When building with kustomize, it'll automatically find and update references to my-app-config with an updated suffix, e.g. my-app-config-f7mm6mhf59.
Bonus, updating secrets: I also use this technique for forcing a reload of secrets (since they're affected in the same way). While I personally manage my secrets completely separately (using Mozilla sops), you can bundle a config map alongside your secrets, so for example in your deployment:
# ...
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: my-app
image: my-app:tag
envFrom:
# For any NON-secret environment variables. Name is automatically updated by Kustomize
- configMapRef:
name: my-app-config
# Defined separately OUTSIDE of Kustomize. Just modify SECRETS_VERSION=[number] in the my-app-config ConfigMap
# to trigger an update in both the config as well as the secrets (since the pod will get restarted).
- secretRef:
name: my-app-secrets
Then, just add a variable like SECRETS_VERSION into your ConfigMap like I did above. Then, each time you change my-app-secrets, just increment the value of SECRETS_VERSION, which serves no other purpose except to trigger a change in the kustomize'd ConfigMap name, which should also result in a restart of your pod. So then it becomes:
I also banged my head around this problem for some time and wished to solve this in an elegant but quick way.
Here are my 20 cents:
The answer using labels as mentioned here won't work if you are updating labels. But would work if you always add labels. More details here.
The answer mentioned here is the most elegant way to do this quickly according to me but had the problem of handling deletes. I am adding on to this answer:
Solution
I am doing this in one of the Kubernetes Operator where only a single task is performed in one reconcilation loop.
Compute the hash of the config map data. Say it comes as v2.
Create ConfigMap cm-v2 having labels: version: v2 and product: prime if it does not exist and RETURN. If it exists GO BELOW.
Find all the Deployments which have the label product: prime but do not have version: v2, If such deployments are found, DELETE them and RETURN. ELSE GO BELOW.
Delete all ConfigMap which has the label product: prime but does not have version: v2 ELSE GO BELOW.
Create Deployment deployment-v2 with labels product: prime and version: v2 and having config map attached as cm-v2 and RETURN, ELSE Do nothing.
That's it! It looks long, but this could be the fastest implementation and is in principle with treating infrastructure as Cattle (immutability).
Also, the above solution works when your Kubernetes Deployment has Recreate update strategy. Logic may require little tweaks for other scenarios.
How do I automatically restart Kubernetes pods and pods associated
with deployments when their configmap is changed/updated?
If you are using configmap as Environment you have to use the external option.
Reloader
Kube watcher
Configurator
Kubernetes auto-reload the config map if it's mounted as volume (If subpath there it won't work with that).
When a ConfigMap currently consumed in a volume is updated, projected
keys are eventually updated as well. The kubelet checks whether the
mounted ConfigMap is fresh on every periodic sync. However, the
kubelet uses its local cache for getting the current value of the
ConfigMap. The type of the cache is configurable using the
ConfigMapAndSecretChangeDetectionStrategy field in the
KubeletConfiguration struct. A ConfigMap can be either propagated by
watch (default), ttl-based, or by redirecting all requests directly to
the API server. As a result, the total delay from the moment when the
ConfigMap is updated to the moment when new keys are projected to the
Pod can be as long as the kubelet sync period + cache propagation
delay, where the cache propagation delay depends on the chosen cache
type (it equals to watch propagation delay, ttl of cache, or zero
correspondingly).
Official document : https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/configmap/#mounted-configmaps-are-updated-automatically
ConfigMaps consumed as environment variables are not updated automatically and require a pod restart.
Simple example Configmap
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: config
namespace: default
data:
foo: bar
POD config
spec:
containers:
- name: configmaptestapp
image: <Image>
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /config
name: configmap-data-volume
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
volumes:
- name: configmap-data-volume
configMap:
name: config
Example : https://medium.com/#harsh.manvar111/update-configmap-without-restarting-pod-56801dce3388
Adding the immutable property to the config map totally avoids the problem. Using config hashing helps in a seamless rolling update but it does not help in a rollback. You can take a look at this open-source project - 'Configurator' - https://github.com/gopaddle-io/configurator.git .'Configurator' works by the following using the custom resources :
Configurator ties the deployment lifecycle with the configMap. When
the config map is updated, a new version is created for that
configMap. All the deployments that were attached to the configMap
get a rolling update with the latest configMap version tied to it.
When you roll back the deployment to an older version, it bounces to
configMap version it had before doing the rolling update.
This way you can maintain versions to the config map and facilitate rolling and rollback to your deployment along with the config map.
Another way is to stick it into the command section of the Deployment:
...
command: [ "echo", "
option = value\n
other_option = value\n
" ]
...
Alternatively, to make it more ConfigMap-like, use an additional Deployment that will just host that config in the command section and execute kubectl create on it while adding an unique 'version' to its name (like calculating a hash of the content) and modifying all the deployments that use that config:
...
command: [ "/usr/sbin/kubectl-apply-config.sh", "
option = value\n
other_option = value\n
" ]
...
I'll probably post kubectl-apply-config.sh if it ends up working.
(don't do that; it looks too bad)