6.6 Deploy your Chart with different environment configurations

One of the most typical challenges when deploying an application is the handling of different deployment environments.

A typical use case is to deploy your application into a Development and Production environment. Helm is a great solution for handling this challenge. In this lab we are going to show you how to prepare your Helm releases for different environments.

Task 6.6.1 Create a devlopment release

Let us start with a new value file for the Development environment. Create a new file called values-dev.yaml and add following content to the file

• Set the number of replicas to 1
• Change the Ingress configuration to match the following path schema http://mychart-develop-<namespace>.training.cluster.acend.ch/
• Because we don’t need any persistence for the Development environment, disable the database with database.enabled: false

replicaCount: 1

ingress:
  enabled: true
  hosts:
    - host: mychart-develop-<namespace>.training.cluster.acend.ch
      paths:
        - path: /
          pathType: ImplementationSpecific
  tls: []

database:
  enabled: false

You can specify the ‘–values’/’-f’ flag multiple times. The priority will be given to the last (right-most) file specified. For example, if both myvalues.yaml and override.yaml contained a key called ‘Test’, the value set in override.yaml would take precedence.

Now install the development release with the following command. First pass the values.yaml file which contains all the default values. Then pass the values-dev.yaml as second file argument. So the values-dev.yaml will overwrite the default Chart values.

helm upgrade -i myapp-dev .  -f values.yaml -f values-dev.yaml --namespace $USER 

Task 6.6.2 Create a production release

Create for the Production environment e new value files named values-prod.yaml and add the following settings to the file

• Due to the higher load in our production environment, we change the number of replicas to 3
• For production usage we also want to persist the data. To enable the database set database.enabled to true
• Change the database user under database.databaseuser to acend-prod
• As a best practice, never use the same password in different environemnts. Change the password under database.databasename
• Change the Ingress configuration to match the following path schema mychart-production-<namespace>.training.cluster.acend.ch

Task 6.6.3 Solution

The values-prod.yaml should look as follow:

replicaCount: 3

ingress:
  enabled: true
  hosts:
    - host: mychart-production-<namespace>.training.cluster.acend.ch
      paths:
        - path: /
          pathType: ImplementationSpecific
  tls: []

database:
  enabled: true
  databaseuser: acend-prod
  databasename: acenddb-prod

Install the production release with the following command. Again pass first the default values with -f values-yaml and then the production values with -d values-prod.yaml

helm upgrade -i myapp-prod .  -f values.yaml -f values-prod.yaml --namespace $USER

Task 6.6.8: Clean up

Uninstall the app

helm uninstall myapp-prod --namespace $USER
helm uninstall myapp-dev --namespace $USER