Integration of Kubernetes Helm templates for a project deployment

Question

Currently I am working with a project based on a micro service architecture. For making this project, I have 20 Spring Boot micro service projects are there. I for for every root folder I placed my Dockerfile for image building. And I am using Kubernetes cluster for deployment through Helm chart.

My confusion here that, when I created Helm chart, it giving the service.yaml and deployment.yaml inside template directory.

If I am deploying these 20 microservices, do I need to create 20 separate helm chart ? Or Can I create service for every 20 within 1 chart?

I am new to Kubernetes and Helm chart. So I am confused about the standard way of using yaml files with chart. Do I need to create 20 separate chart or can I include in 1 chart?

How can I follow the standard way of chart creation for my micro service projects please?

Answer 1

What I ended up doing (working with a similar stack), is create one microservice Chart, which is stored in an internal Chart repository. Inside of the Helm Chart, I gave enough configuration options, so teams have the flexibility to control their own deployments, but I made sure to set sensible defaults (e.g. make sure the Deployment utilises a RollingUpdateStrategy and readiness probes are configured with sensible defaults).

These configuration options can be passed by the values.yaml file. Teams deploy their microservice via a CICD pipeline, passing the values.yaml file to the helm command (with the -f flag).

I would certainly recommend you read the Helm Template Developer guide, before making the decision. It really depends on how similar your microservices are, but I recommend going for 1 Helm Chart if you have a homogenous environment (which also was the case for me).