Deploy the gnocchi helm chart on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy the Gnocchi Helm chart on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you would need to follow these high-level steps:

1. **Set up an AKS cluster**: Create a Kubernetes cluster in Azure using Pulumi.
2. **Install the Helm chart for Gnocchi**: Use Pulumi's Helm support to deploy Gnocchi onto the AKS cluster.

We'll use two main resources from Pulumi's Azure Native provider to accomplish this:

- `ManagedCluster`: Represents the AKS cluster we will create and manage.
- `Chart`: Represents the Helm chart we want to deploy, part of the Pulumi Kubernetes provider.

Here's a Pulumi program written in TypeScript that does exactly this:

```typescript
import * as azure from "@pulumi/azure-native";
import * as k8s from "@pulumi/kubernetes";
import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";

// Step 1. Set up an AKS cluster
// We start by declaring the AKS cluster resource.

const resourceGroup = new azure.resources.ResourceGroup("resourceGroup", {
    resourceGroupName: "myResourceGroup",
    location: "East US", // You can choose a different location
});

const aksCluster = new azure.containerservice.ManagedCluster("aksCluster", {
    resourceGroupName: resourceGroup.name,
    location: resourceGroup.location,
    // Define the properties for your AKS cluster, like size, count, and version.
    agentPoolProfiles: [{
        count: 2, // The desired number of agent nodes
        maxPods: 110, // The max number of pods that can run on a node
        mode: "System",
        name: "agentpool",
        osType: "Linux",
        vmSize: "Standard_DS2_v2", // The size of the virtual machines to use
    }],
    dnsPrefix: "myakscluster",
    kubernetesVersion: "1.20.7",
    // You should define proper network profile based on your requirements
    // For the purpose of this example, we are using the default values provided by Azure
});

// Getting the kubeconfig of the AKS cluster for k8s provider to use
const creds = pulumi.all([resourceGroup.name, aksCluster.name]).apply(([rgName, clusterName]) => 
    azure.containerservice.listManagedClusterUserCredentials({
        resourceGroupName: rgName,
        resourceName: clusterName,
    })
);

const kubeconfig = creds.apply(c => Buffer.from(c.kubeconfigs[0].value, 'base64').toString());

// Step 2. Install the Helm chart for Gnocchi
// Now that we have an AKS cluster, we will use the Pulumi Kubernetes provider to install the Gnocchi Helm chart.

const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8sProvider", { kubeconfig });

const gnocchiChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("gnocchi", {
    chart: "gnocchi",
    version: "x.y.z", // Specify the version of the chart you want to deploy
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: "https://helm-repository-url/", // Specify the Helm repository URL
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// We would now have a running instance of Gnocchi on our AKS cluster.

export const aksClusterName = aksCluster.name;
export const aksClusterKubeconfig = kubeconfig;
```

In the provided program, replace `x.y.z` with the actual version of the `gnocchi` Helm chart and `https://helm-repository-url/` with the correct Helm chart repository URL.

### Explanation

In this program:

- We start by creating a new resource group in Azure where our AKS cluster will reside.
- We create an AKS cluster within the resource group. We can specify the number of nodes, VM size, Kubernetes version, etc., based on our requirements.
- We acquire the AKS cluster credentials to interact with our newly created Kubernetes cluster.
- We use a `k8s.Provider`, which knows how to interact with our Kubernetes cluster using its kubeconfig.
- We use the `Chart` resource from Pulumi's Kubernetes provider to deploy Gnocchi using Helm. This is the equivalent of running `helm install` but with the added benefits of Pulumi's state management.

Once you have written this program in a file (e.g., `index.ts`), you can run it using the Pulumi CLI commands `pulumi up` to create the resources. If you need to change the number of nodes or other properties, you just change the code and run `pulumi up` again.

Finally, the `export` statements at the end of our code will output the AKS cluster name and kubeconfig after the `pulumi up` command finishes. This allows you to use kubectl to interact with your cluster.