Deploy the tsorage helm chart on Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart to a Digital Ocean Kubernetes cluster with Pulumi involves several steps. First, you would set up the Kubernetes cluster on Digital Ocean. Next, you would configure Pulumi to use the right provider and stack references. Lastly, you would deploy the Helm chart to your new Kubernetes cluster.

### Step 1: Set up the Kubernetes cluster on Digital Ocean

First, we will set up the Kubernetes cluster using the DigitalOcean provider. We define a cluster and a node pool for that cluster.

### Step 2: Deploy the Helm Chart

After the cluster is provisioned, you can deploy applications using Helm charts. Pulumi provides a Kubernetes provider which can deploy Helm charts from various repositories or your local file system.

Remember that deploying with Pulumi works by writing code to define your infrastructure and then executing this code using the Pulumi CLI. The given TypeScript code needs to be part of a Pulumi project. To use the following program, ensure Pulumi is installed, you have an account with Digital Ocean and have the necessary API tokens available.

In the example below, we're going to use Pulumi with TypeScript. Make sure to replace `"your-helm-chart-name"` with the actual name of the chart you're deploying and update the `chart` and `version` properties with the exact chart information you wish to deploy.

Here's the TypeScript code that sets up the Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service and deploys a Helm chart to it:

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

// Step 1: Create a Digital Ocean Kubernetes cluster
const cluster = new digitalocean.KubernetesCluster("do-cluster", {
    region: "nyc3",
    version: "1.21.5-do.0",
    nodePool: {
        size: "s-2vcpu-2gb",
        name: "default-pool",
        nodeCount: 3,
    },
});

// Step 2: Use Pulumi to deploy a Helm Chart
const helmChart = new kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart("tsorage", {
    chart: "your-helm-chart-name",
    version: "your-chart-version",
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: "http://charts.example.com/", // Replace with the Helm chart repository
    },
    // Assuming your Digital Ocean K8s cluster is correctly set as the kubeconfig's current context:
    // If not, you may need to configure the provider with the appropriate kubeconfig
}, { provider: new kubernetes.Provider("do-k8s", { kubeconfig: cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig }) });

// Export the cluster's kubeconfig and the Helm chart deployment status
export const kubeConfig = cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig;
export const helmChartStatus = helmChart.status;
```

Let's talk about what each portion of this code does:

1. We start by importing the necessary modules from the Pulumi library.
2. We then create a new Digital Ocean Kubernetes cluster with a specified region, version, and a node pool configuration.
3. Next, we create a new Helm chart resource with Pulumi, which will be installed on our cluster once it's available.
4. We are making use of `helm.v3.Chart` class from the Pulumi Kubernetes provider to define our Helm chart deployment.
5. The `kubeconfig` is obtained from the newly created Digital Ocean cluster. It is often required to interact with the cluster when using kubectl or a Kubernetes client.
6. Finally, we export the `kubeConfig` and the `helmChartStatus` which allows you to interact with the Kubernetes cluster and view the deployment status respectively outside of Pulumi.

Make sure to change placeholders like `"your-helm-chart-name"` and `"your-chart-version"` to the actual information for the chart you want to deploy. The `repo` property within `fetchOpts` should be set to the Helm repository URL where your desired chart is located.

You will run this code using Pulumi CLI commands like `pulumi up` to preview and deploy the changes. After deployment, you can export the kubeconfig and use it with `kubectl` to interact with your cluster or check the Helm release status on the cluster.