Deploy the kiali helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy the Kiali Helm chart on a Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster using Pulumi, we will follow these general steps:

Ensure you have access to a Rancher Kubernetes cluster.
Add the necessary Helm repository that contains the Kiali chart.
Use Pulumi's Helm Chart resource to deploy Kiali onto your Rancher cluster.

Before we begin with the Pulumi code, make sure you have Pulumi installed, you are logged in to the Pulumi service, and you have access to your Rancher Kubernetes cluster configuration, typically via a kubeconfig file.

Below is a TypeScript Pulumi program that deploys the Kiali Helm chart. In this program:

We import the required Pulumi packages.
We create a new Kubernetes provider which points to our Rancher Kubernetes cluster.
We use the helm.v3.Chart resource to deploy Kiali, providing the repo and chart information alongside any values you'd like to customize.

Let's look at the detailed program:

import * as pulumi from '@pulumi/pulumi';
import * as k8s from '@pulumi/kubernetes';

// Create a Kubernetes provider instance that uses our existing kubeconfig
const rancherK8sProvider = new k8s.Provider('rancherK8s', {
    kubeconfig: '<YOUR_KUBECONFIG_CONTENT>', // Replace with your actual kubeconfig content or path
});

// Deploy the Kiali Helm chart using the Helm Chart resource
const kialiChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart('kiali', {
    chart: 'kiali',
    version: '<HELM_CHART_VERSION>', // Specify the version of Kiali you want to deploy
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: 'https://kiali.org/helm-charts', // This is the repository where the Kiali chart is hosted
    },
    // Define any values you want to override. This is an example set of values.
    values: {
        dashboard: {
            serviceType: 'ClusterIP',
        },
        // Include any other values that you might want to override
    },
}, { provider: rancherK8sProvider });

// Export the Kiali service endpoint
export const kialiServiceUrl = pulumi.interpolate `http://${kialiChart.getResourceProperty('v1/Service', 'kiali-server', 'status', 'loadBalancer', 'ingress', 0, 'ip')}:${kialiChart.getResourceProperty('v1/Service', 'kiali-server', 'spec', 'ports', 0, 'port')}`;

Replace <YOUR_KUBECONFIG_CONTENT> with the actual content of your kubeconfig file or provide a path to it. Also, replace <HELM_CHART_VERSION> with the version of the Kiali Helm chart that you wish to deploy.

This Pulumi program creates a Helm chart resource named kiali and then deploys it to the cluster pointed to by the provided kubeconfig. The values object is where you can provide custom configurations for your Kiali deployment. In this example, we've assumed that the Kiali Helm chart has a service named 'kiali-server' and we want to export its IP and port; you should adjust these resource keys to match the actual ones used by the Kiali helm chart.

Remember, before running this Pulumi program, make sure you've installed Pulumi, set up your Pulumi project, and have initialized your stack.

To execute the program, run the following commands in your terminal:

pulumi up

This command will start the Pulumi deployment process, during which Pulumi will communicate with your Kubernetes cluster and execute the necessary steps to deploy the Kiali Helm chart.

After the process completes, you can see the outputs by running:

pulumi stack output

This will display the exported values, such as the service URL for Kiali, which you can use to access the Kiali dashboard.

Should you wish to remove the Kiali deployment, you can run:

pulumi destroy

This command will remove all resources created by Pulumi in your Kubernetes cluster.