(eks): Add Helmfile support

[tuusberg]

I have recently built an AWS CDK application that is used to provision EKS clusters in multiple regions. The essential Helm Charts are installed into every cluster using HelmChart construct:

• kube-prometheus-stack
• metrics-server
• fluentd
• cert-manager
• ingress-nginx
• kubernetes-external-secrets

While this approach works for us, I feel that this approach has a few tradeoffs:

• One needs to be familiar with the CDK in order to tweak configuration.
• Values have to be overwritten by passing a hash map to HelmChart constructor. I've written a small convenience function that loads values from YAML files stored inside helm/ directory so that we can achieve something that's more intuitive for developers familiar with Helm, but it's not very elegant.

Helmfile to the rescue! It would keep the code and configuration separate and would allow engineers to declare services and their relations using YAML files (think of it as Helm for Helm).

I am planning to dig deeper and find a solution for it (looks like a Custom Resource should do the trick), but wanted to check if someone in the community would benefit from it.

Use Case

Provisioning production grade EKS clusters with all the essential services installed.

• [x] :wave: I may be able to implement this feature request
• [ ] :warning: This feature might incur a breaking change

---

This is a :rocket: Feature Request

[iliapolo]

@tuusberg This is interesting. I wasn't aware of this Helmfile project.

Are you looking to add this to the EKS module, or develop as a third-party module? I think it is better suited as a third-party, especially when still in its early stages of development (both the tool itself and the potential CDK support).

We would be happy to assist you in developing and publishing this as a third-party module.

If your looking for a centralized place to discuss this with the community, you can open a new discussion and link to it from here. I also suggest posting this to the #aws-cdk channel in our slack workspace on cdk.dev.

WDYT?

[pgollucci]

Thats a plan. I am also a little interested in helmfile but prefer cdk8s.

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 6:12 AM Eli Polonsky notifications@github.com wrote:

@tuusberg https://github.com/tuusberg This is interesting. I wasn't aware of this Helmfile https://github.com/roboll/helmfile project.

Are you looking to add this to the EKS module, or develop as a third-party module? I think it is better suited as a third-party, especially when still in its early stages of development (both the tool itself and the potential CDK support).

We would be happy to assist you in developing and publishing this as a third-party module.

If your looking for a centralized place to discuss this with the community, you can open a new discussion https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/discussions/new and link to it from here. I also suggest posting this to the #aws-cdk channel in our slack workspace on cdk.dev.

WDYT?

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/12275#issuecomment-752420862, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAIL52P4O4JRB5IZYCXCRTSXMDI7ANCNFSM4VNXUC2Q .

-- Philip M. Gollucci IT Executive and Engineering Leader http://www.linkedin.com/in/pgollucci/ 301.818.0719

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has not received a response in a while. If you want to keep this issue open, please leave a comment below and auto-close will be canceled.