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

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy the Alpine Helm chart on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you'll leverage Pulumi's ability to create and manage cloud resources with an infrastructure as code approach. We'll write a Pulumi program in TypeScript that performs the following steps:

1. Provision an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster using the `azure-native` provider.
2. Deploy the Alpine Helm chart to the AKS cluster using Pulumi's Kubernetes provider.

Firstly, ensure that you have the Pulumi CLI installed and configured for use with your Azure account. You should also have Node.js installed to run the TypeScript program.

Here's a step-by-step Pulumi program to accomplish the deployment:

1. **Setting up the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster**: We use the `ProvisionedCluster` resource from the `azure-native.hybridcontainerservice` namespace. This resource provisions an AKS cluster for us on Azure.

2. **Deploying the Helm Chart**: We use the `Chart` resource from the `kubernetes.helm.sh/v3` that Pulumi provides to deploy Helm charts. The Helm chart for Alpine is straightforward since Alpine is a lightweight Linux distribution and typically doesn't require complex configurations. However, in a typical scenario, you would customize the `values` property with the necessary configuration for your Helm chart.

3. **Connecting the AKS cluster and Helm chart deployment**: Pulumi automatically handles the dependency between the AKS cluster and the Helm chart. It ensures that the Helm chart is only deployed once the cluster is ready.

Below is the detailed TypeScript program that performs these steps:

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

// Step 1: Create a new AKS cluster
const resourceGroup = new azure_native.resources.ResourceGroup("resourceGroup", {
    resourceGroupName: "aksResourceGroup",
    location: "East US",
});

const cluster = new azure_native.hybridcontainerservice.ProvisionedCluster("aksCluster", {
    // To keep things simple, we're omitting detailed configurations like identity, agent pool profiles, etc.
    // You can specify further details according to your requirements.
    resourceGroupName: resourceGroup.name,
    location: resourceGroup.location,
    kubernetesVersion: "1.20.9", // Example: Specify the version you require for your cluster
});

// Step 2: Deploy the Alpine Helm chart
const alpineChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("alpine", {
    chart: "alpine",
    // Specify the Helm repository that contains the chart if it's not in the default Helm repo
    // You can add `fetchOpts: { repo: "<URL-of-the-Helm-Repository>" }` to specify the Helm repository
    // For this example, we assume the "alpine" chart exists in the Helm repository added to your environment.
    // Values for Helm chart; omit if not configuring anything specific for this deployment
    values: {},
    // use the AKS cluster as the k8s provider
    provider: new k8s.Provider("k8sProvider", {
        kubeconfig: cluster.kubeConfigRaw,
    }),
}, { dependsOn: cluster });

// Export the kubeConfig of AKS cluster to access it later with kubectl
export const kubeConfig = cluster.kubeConfigRaw;
```

Here's what each significant part of the code does:

- We initialize a new resource group for our AKS cluster using the `ResourceGroup` resource. This is a logical container that holds related resources for an Azure solution.

- We create a `ProvisionedCluster` resource, representing the AKS cluster itself. You may need to customize the `kubernetesVersion` and other properties based on your particular requirements.

- We instantiate a `Chart` object for the Alpine helm chart. We leave the `values` property empty since Alpine typically requires no configuration.

- The `"k8sProvider"` is created and given the `kubeconfig` from the AKS cluster. This ensures that the Helm chart is deployed to the correct Kubernetes cluster.

After deploying your Pulumi program with `pulumi up`, the `kubeConfig` of the AKS cluster is exported. You can use this with `kubectl` or other Kubernetes tooling to access your cluster, like so:

```shell
pulumi stack output kubeConfig > kubeconfig.yaml
export KUBECONFIG=kubeconfig.yaml
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
```

Remember that for real deployment, you should not output sensitive data like `kubeConfig`. It is shown here for educational purposes, assuming a development environment. In production, you would handle such outputs securely.

Make sure all dependencies like `@pulumi/pulumi`, `@pulumi/azure-native`, and `@pulumi/kubernetes` are installed in your project by running `npm install` or `yarn add` for each package.