Deploy the stress helm chart on Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart to a managed Kubernetes service involves a couple of steps. For Digital Ocean's Kubernetes Service (DOKS), we'll start by creating a Kubernetes cluster, then we'll use Pulumi's Helm capabilities to deploy the `stress` chart to that cluster.

Below is a detailed explanation of how you can accomplish this using Pulumi's TypeScript SDK.

### Step 1: Create a Digital Ocean Kubernetes Cluster
First, we use Pulumi's DigitalOcean provider to create a Kubernetes cluster. We need to specify the region, the version of Kubernetes, and the size and number of nodes for the node pool.

### Step 2: Install and Configure the Helm Chart
Once the cluster is up and running, we'll deploy the `stress` Helm chart. This is done by creating a new Helm chart resource. The Helm chart can be specified by chart name, version, and any additional configuration settings that are needed. The chart name `stress` suggests that this chart deploys a workload to the cluster designed to stress-test it.

For deployment, we'll need to add the required Pulumi packages to our project. They can be installed via npm or yarn:
```shell
npm install @pulumi/digitalocean @pulumi/kubernetes
```

or

```shell
yarn add @pulumi/digitalocean @pulumi/kubernetes
```

Now, let's write out the Pulumi program in TypeScript:

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

// Step 1: Create a new DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster
const cluster = new digitalocean.KubernetesCluster("do-cluster", {
    region: digitalocean.Regions.NYC1,
    version: "latest", // Replace with the desired version if targeting a specific Kubernetes version
    nodePool: {
        name: "default-pool",
        size: digitalocean.DropletSlugs.DropletS2VCPU2GB, // Choose the right size for your needs
        nodeCount: 3, // Adjust based on your requirements for the cluster
    },
});

// Step 2: Create a Helm release for the "stress" chart on the cluster
const stressChart = new kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart("stress-chart", {
    chart: "stress",
    // You may need to set a repository where the stress chart is hosted or use a local path
    // i.e., repository: "https://some-charts.example.com/"
    // version: "1.0.0", // specify the chart version if needed
    namespace: "default", // target namespace in your cluster
}, { provider: new kubernetes.Provider("k8s-provider", { kubeconfig: cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig }) });

// Stack exports
export const kubeconfig = cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig;
export const stressChartStatus = stressChart.status;
```

Please replace `"latest"` with the actual version string if you want to target a specific Kubernetes version. Additionally, if the `stress` Helm chart is not in the default Helm repo, you'll need to specify the `repository` option with the URL of the Helm repo.

### Explanation of the Pulumi Program
1. We import the `@pulumi/digitalocean` and `@pulumi/kubernetes` modules to interact with DigitalOcean and Kubernetes resources.
2. The `digitalocean.KubernetesCluster` resource creates a new Kubernetes cluster. We give it a name (`"do-cluster"`), the region where we want our cluster (e.g., `"nyc1"`), the Kubernetes version (you can use `"latest"` or a specific version such as `"1.18.8-do.0"`), and we define the specifications for the node pool, including its name, size, and node count.
3. The `kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart` resource is used to deploy a Helm chart to our cluster. We give it a name (`"stress-chart"`), the name of the chart (`"stress"`), and optionally, the chart version and the namespace in Kubernetes where the chart will be deployed.
4. We export the kubeconfig necessary to interact with our cluster using Kubernetes tools like `kubectl` and the status of the Helm chart so you can easily check if the deployment succeeded.

After running the Pulumi program above, Pulumi will create the resources and begin managing their state. If you're new to Pulumi and would like to learn more about how to run the code and manage these resources, you can refer to the [Pulumi documentation](https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/).