Deploy the k8s-rke-backup helm chart on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart on an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster using Pulumi is done in a few steps. First, you'll need to provision an AKS cluster if you don't have one already. Then you can deploy your Helm chart to that cluster. Below I will go through these steps, providing comments to explain each part of the process.

### Step 1: Provision an AKS Cluster

We will start by provisioning an AKS cluster using the `azure-native` provider. We'll set up a managed Kubernetes cluster that Azure will maintain for us.

To create the AKS cluster, we need to first create a resource group, which is like a folder that will contain all our Azure resources. Then we create the AKS cluster within that resource group.

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

// Create an Azure Resource Group
const resourceGroup = new azure.resources.ResourceGroup("resourceGroup");

// Create an AKS cluster
const cluster = new azure.containerservice.ManagedCluster("myAksCluster", {
    resourceGroupName: resourceGroup.name,
    agentPoolProfiles: [{
        count: 1,
        vmSize: "Standard_DS2_v2",
        mode: "System",
    }],
    dnsPrefix: "myakscluster",
    kubernetesVersion: "1.19.7",
});

// Export the kubeconfig
export const kubeconfig = pulumi.all([cluster.name, resourceGroup.name]).apply(([clusterName, rgName]) => {
    return azure.containerservice.listManagedClusterUserCredentials({
        resourceGroupName: rgName,
        resourceName: clusterName,
    }).then(creds => {
        const encoded = creds.kubeconfigs[0].value;
        return Buffer.from(encoded, 'base64').toString();
    });
});
```

### Step 2: Deploy the Helm Chart

Once the AKS cluster is up and running, we can deploy Helm charts to it. To do this, we'll use Pulumi's `kubernetes` provider which allows us to interact with a Kubernetes cluster to manage resources like Helm charts, pods, services, etc.

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

// Create a Kubernetes provider instance that uses our kubeconfig
const provider = new k8s.Provider("k8sProvider", {
    kubeconfig: kubeconfig,
});

// Deploy the Helm chart using the kubernetes provider
const rkeBackupChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("rke-backup", {
    chart: "k8s-rke-backup",
    // Specify the chart version if needed
    // version: "<chart_version>",
    // Values for the Helm chart are provided here 
    values: {
        // Specific values for the rke-backup chart
    },
}, { provider: provider });

// Export the Helm chart status
export const helmChartStatus = rkeBackupChart.status;
```

Explanation:
- We start by importing the appropriate modules from Pulumi's SDK, which includes Azure and Kubernetes modules.
- We define a provider, which tells Pulumi how to communicate with our Kubernetes cluster. The provider requires a `kubeconfig`, which we exported from the AKS cluster resource we created in the first step.
- We then deploy our Helm chart using `k8s.helm.v3.Chart` resource. You would replace `"k8s-rke-backup"` with the name of the actual Helm chart if it is different; sometimes charts have a prefix like `stable/` if they are from the standard Helm repository.
- In the `values` object, you can provide your custom configurations that need to be passed to the Helm chart. These are the equivalent of the Helm command line `--set` option.
- Finally, we're exporting `helmChartStatus` which gives us some insights into the deployment status of the Helm chart.

Now, with these steps, you have a TypeScript program that provisions an AKS cluster and deploys the "k8s-rke-backup" Helm chart to it. You can run this program using the Pulumi CLI by running `pulumi up`. This will start the deployment process and you'll be able to monitor each step directly from your terminal.