Deploy the tt-workflow helm chart on Linode Kubernetes Engine

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy a Helm chart on Linode Kubernetes Engine using Pulumi, you'll need to follow these steps:

1. Set up a Kubernetes cluster on Linode if you don't have one already.
2. Install and set up Pulumi on your local machine.
3. Define the Pulumi program to deploy your Helm chart to the Kubernetes cluster.

Before we write the program, let's ensure you understand a few Pulumi concepts:

- **Stack**: A stack is an isolated, independently configurable instance of a Pulumi program. Think of it like an environment; you might have a development, staging, and production stack.
- **Resources**: These are the core elements within Pulumi. They represent a piece of your cloud infrastructure, such as a compute instance or a database, and can be from any cloud provider.

To work with Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE), you'll need to be authenticated with Linode and have a Kubernetes cluster provisioned. Pulumi uses the Kubernetes provider to interact with Kubernetes, and you can configure the provider with the required kubeconfig.

Here's a basic Pulumi program written in TypeScript to deploy a Helm chart to an existing Linode Kubernetes cluster:

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

// Replace with the appropriate values for your Linode Kubernetes Engine cluster
const kubeconfig: string = `...`; // Your Kubernetes config from Linode

// Create a Kubernetes provider instance using the kubeconfig from Linode
const provider = new k8s.Provider("lke-provider", {kubeconfig});

// Deploy the 'tt-workflow' Helm chart
const chart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("tt-workflow-chart", {
    chart: "tt-workflow",
    // Add the repository where your Helm chart is located
    // for example: 'https://charts.example.com/'.
    // If it's a local chart, you would use the 'path' property instead
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: "https://charts.example.com/",
    },
    // Specify namespace if needed, otherwise default is used
    namespace: "default",
    // Add any custom values here.
    // values: {
    //   key: "value",
    // },
}, {provider});

// Export the name of the chart
export const chartName = chart.metadata.apply(m => m.name);
```

In this program:

- We first import the Kubernetes package from Pulumi.
- We provide the kubeconfig of our Linode Kubernetes cluster.
- We create a Kubernetes provider to communicate with our LKE cluster.
- We create a new Helm chart resource, specifying the name of our Helm chart and optional values such as custom values and namespace.

Remember to replace `kubeconfig` with actual kubeconfig data from your Linode cluster and adjust the `repo` value to point to the chart repository containing the `tt-workflow` Helm chart.

You may also need to install the Kubernetes provider plugin and Helm package if you haven't already:

```bash
pulumi plugin install resource kubernetes v4.4.0
npm install @pulumi/kubernetes
```

Once the program is set up, run it via the Pulumi CLI:

```bash
pulumi up
```

This command will initialize a deployment based on the Pulumi program you've written. It will prompt you to review the deployment plan and confirm the actions before performing them.

After the process has completed successfully, the `tt-workflow` Helm chart will be deployed to your Linode Kubernetes Engine.