LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China 2018

Kubernetes has a large number of primitives to support container management, and also a helm ecosystem to help package these primitives into a single, deployable unit. The primary focus of helm is to provide an out-of-box solution for application package, as well as a unified experience for orchestrating and deploying charts. This architectural design choice makes helm less developer friendly and thus hard to build extensions on top of it. To remedy the problems, we built a release controller on top of helm, and a set of third-party systems around the controller. In this talk, we’ll first show how we use helm to manage all of our applications; then talk about the details of the problems we’ve encountered and how we tackle the problems using the release controller. We’ll also describe the unique properties of the design and how we equip it with all different kinds of extensions.