Deploy the emqx helm chart on Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy the EMQX Helm chart on a DigitalOcean Kubernetes Service (DOKS) cluster using Pulumi, we'll perform the following steps:

1. Set up a new DOKS cluster.
2. Install the Helm chart for EMQX on the DOKS cluster.

For this, we will make use of two Pulumi resources:
- `digitalocean.KubernetesCluster` to create a Kubernetes cluster on DigitalOcean.
- `kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart` to deploy the EMQX Helm chart on the created Kubernetes cluster.

Let's start by installing the necessary Pulumi packages. You need to have Pulumi CLI and Node.js installed on your machine. Then, you can use npm or yarn to install the `@pulumi/digitalocean` and `@pulumi/kubernetes` packages:

```sh
npm install @pulumi/digitalocean @pulumi/kubernetes
```

or

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

Now, let's create a Pulumi program in TypeScript to perform the deployment.

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

// Create a DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster
const cluster = new digitalocean.KubernetesCluster('do-k8s-cluster', {
  region: 'nyc1', // Choose the region that is closest to you or your users
  version: 'latest', // Specify the desired Kubernetes version, or use 'latest'
  nodePool: {
    name: 'default', 
    size: 's-2vcpu-2gb', // Choose the appropriate size for your workload
    nodeCount: 2, // Specify the number of nodes in the node pool
  },
});

// Export the Kubeconfig so that we can access the cluster with kubectl
export const kubeconfig = cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig;

// Install the EMQX Helm chart on the cluster
const emqxChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart('emqx', {
  // Add the EMQX chart repository
  repo: 'emqx',
  chart: 'emqx',
  // Specify the namespace to install the chart in or remove the namespace line to use the default namespace
  namespace: 'default',
  // Use the values object to specify chart values
  values: {
    // Provide any specific configuration needed by your EMQX deployment
    // This is where you can customize your EMQX configuration as needed
  }
}, { provider: new k8s.Provider('k8s-provider', { kubeconfig: cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig }) });

// Export the EMQX service endpoint
export const emqxServiceEndpoint = emqxChart.getResourceProperty('v1/Service', 'emqx', 'status').apply(status => {
  if (status.loadBalancer.ingress) {
    return status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname || status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip;
  } else {
    return 'LoadBalancer not assigned';
  }
});
```

This program performs the following actions:

1. It specifies the **DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster** to be created with the desired region, version, size, and node count. You should choose the region closest to you or your users for better performance. The Kubernetes version is set to `latest`, but you can specify a different version if required. The node size and node count determine the resources available to your cluster.

2. The `kubeconfig` is exported. This configuration allows you to interact with your cluster using `kubectl` or other Kubernetes tools.

3. The **EMQX Helm chart** is installed with `kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart`. This resource requires a chart repository, which in this case is specified as 'emqx', and the chart name. Namespaces can be used to organize your resources within the cluster. Additional customization can be done by providing a `values` object that specifies the desired configuration for EMQX.

4. A custom `k8s.Provider` is defined using the kubeconfig of the created DigitalOcean cluster. This tells Pulumi to use our newly created DOKS cluster for deploying resources.

5. Lastly, the endpoint for the EMQX service is exported. This value will let us know the entry point to access the EMQX broker once it's deployed.

Remember to set up your Pulumi project and authenticate with DigitalOcean. You will also need to add the EMQX Helm repository to your Helm configuration outside of Pulumi:

```sh
helm repo add emqx https://repos.emqx.io/charts
```

To deploy this code, run `pulumi up` from your terminal in the directory where this Pulumi program is saved.

Be sure to monitor your DigitalOcean resource usage to stay within your budget or servicing needs. Adjust the node count and size according to your expected workload.