Helm, Slackbot, Scripting and etc ( Kubernetes journey at Reece: Part III)

This is the Part III of my series of ReeceTech’s journey towards Kubernetes.

In this article I would explain how we implement Kubernetes via scripting and tools including open source as well as internal developed ones.

. Helm

Helm is essential for us as a package management tool. Currently we have 11 micro-services teams in a Polyglot environment. We will need to support from Java, Python, Javascript to PHP.

Hence we decide to use helm chart for each existing asset. With that decision we came up with our own structure for each application based on helm template. Here include a snapshot of a typical Java project structure with Maven build script and Helm.

Dev teams will own the configuration from application source code layer but we also maintain a central repo for other environment specific configuration which can override the values in application tier.

Developers are still encouraged to use Helm CLI to search, delete and install their charts.

. Slackbot

Usually developers will use Bamboo to deploy applications. However we find it extremely handy to offer our own Slackbot — Helmet for devs to install, delete and search their applications.

As shown above devs find much easier to run Slack Command to get their jobs done quickly and neatly :)

. Scripting

The DevOps teams start to build more and more tools for delivery teams, ranging from deployment, development to monitoring and alert.

Bash Script, Python, Ruby, CoffeeScript and Golang are all being used for the right purposes.

Configuration as code and Infra-structure as code are thriving and altogether we are building a real echo-system around Kubernetes.

BTW, we are hiring!!! If you are smart and have great passion with DevOps please contact me directly.