Live and let Learn
The recent release of Kubeapps marks a milestone for the Kubeapps team in that we are no longer restricted to presenting a catalog of only Helm packages in our UI and, behind the scenes, we’ve addressed a long-standing security issue to remove the reverse proxy to the Kubernetes API server that our UI depended on until now. We’ve done a few overviews of the new Kubeapps APIs service which makes this possible (see Kubeapps APIs: Beyond Helm, or the TanzuTV episode 74 where Antonio gives an in-depth demo of the Carvel support), or more recently, a demo of the Flux and Carvel support together:
We’ve been able to run Kubeapps in a multi-cluster setup on various Kubernetes clusters for a while now, but this was dependent on the Kubeapps’ user being authenticated in a way that all the clusters trust. Up until now, this meant having all the clusters configured to trust the same OIDC identity provider, which is not possible in some Kubernetes environments.
Particularly, this meant we were unable to demonstrate multi-cluster Kubeapps with clusters created by Tanzu Mission Control since we can’t specify API server options, such as OIDC configuration, when creating a cluster in TMC. But that requirement has now changed thanks to a new project called Pinniped.
For the past couple of years I’ve been working on the Kubeapps project, which until recently has been a UI dashboard for the Helm project - providing a simple, web-based UI to deploy applications on Kubernetes.
I’m currently looking at generalising Kubeapps to support other Kubernetes packages formats, including Carvel from VMware of course. So I set out today to start learning more about Carvel, which in contrast to more monolithic tools like Helm, provides “a set of single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration and deployment to Kubernetes”.
As an example of that composability, I found I can deploy a helm chart using a set of immutable images by utilizing Helm’s new-ish support for post rendering of a chart. Here’s how…
After a lifetime of wanting to fly and months of waiting since deciding to learn, I was finally up at FlyManilla learning to fly a paraglider with 10 other keen wannabe fledglings under Chief Flying Instructor of Godfrey Wenness and two other flying instructors Karl and Bob. Though I’d been looking forward to this for a while and reading as much as I could to prepare, nothing beats being shown the details from years of experience with real equipment that you can touch and try - which is exactly what we were doing on our first day.