Consider using Helm Hub to selfhost Kiam Helm chart

[danmx]

Pushing changes to kiam helm chart in official helm repo to match current deployment suggestions (best practices) takes a lot of time, e.g. helm/charts#9262.

Even maintainers suggest using Helm Hub so the chart could be stored in e.g. this repo.

[Joseph-Irving]

Disclaimer: we don't use helm at all
However it looks like it's a bit of a pain contributing to the helm chart and I know a fair amount of people use the kiam chart so it would be good to make it a better. I think we'll have a look and see how much work it is to get it on helm hub.

[danmx]

@Joseph-Irving cool, if you need contributors I'm happy to help.

[danmx]

@Joseph-Irving out of curiousity what are you using instead of it and on what scale?

[Joseph-Irving]

we just use kubernetes manifests deployed via our CI system, I'm sure helm is very useful in some scenarios but it has always seemed like a needless abstraction to us. Our scale is constantly changing but we've got around 600 deployments, 3k pods, three main kube clusters.

[ewbankkit]

Kind of related: helm/charts#13869.
As I mentioned here I think it would be best for others to be Owners/Maintainers on the Helm chart (wherever it's hosted) and am willing to do whatever is needed to make that happen.

[maorfr]

Here is some information about hosting your own charts (copied from a similar PR):

I think that you totally should host your own charts!
This will give you more freedom around management, and you will not be blocked by us (maintainers).

This means that when users want to install your chart, instead of installing them from stable, they will install it from (for example) mycompany-charts:

$ helm install --name my-release mycompany-charts/mychart
Here are some instructions about how to host your own charts repo:
https://github.com/helm/hub/blob/master/docs/github.md#github-pages-as-a-repository

In order for people to find out about your charts repo, you should add it to helm hub:
https://hub.helm.sh/

Here are some instructions about how to add your charts repo to helm hub:
https://github.com/helm/hub#how-to-add-your-helm-charts

Hope that answered all your questions! :)

[bhavin192]

Kind of related: helm/charts#13869.
As I mentioned here I think it would be best for others to be Owners/Maintainers on the Helm chart (wherever it's hosted) and am willing to do whatever is needed to make that happen.

@Joseph-Irving Till the time we get #232 merged, would you like to take ownership of stable/kiam?
There are multiple fixes to that chart which are waiting to be merged, https://github.com/helm/charts/pulls?q=is:pr+is:open+kiam

I'm planning to add myself to that chart as an owner but I'm not sure how long I will have access to a Kubernetes cluster running on AWS to test the changes.

[Joseph-Irving]

We are currently working on self-hosting, one of our new members @rhysemmas is on it

Hopefully we will have a solution soon

[rhysemmas]

Helm charts for Kiam have now been added to this repo.

The charts are packaged by our CI system and stored in our self-hosted Helm repo, which I have requested to be added to the Helm Hub:

helm/hub#131

In the meantime, our self-hosted repo can be added to the helm cli in the following way (and then the kiam chart installed):

helm repo add uswitch https://uswitch.github.io/kiam-helm-charts/charts/
helm repo update
helm install uswitch/kiam

[rhysemmas]

The uswitch/kiam Helm chart can be found on the Helm Hub here: https://hub.helm.sh/charts/uswitch/kiam - this includes the installation instructions mentioned in my last reply.

Currently there are no changes in functionality between this version of the chart and the stable/kiam chart.

If anyone would like to submit contributions to the Helm charts then please raise PR's against this repo, so we can review them.

[bhavin192]

@rhysemmas @ewbankkit I think we should deprecate stable/kima in favour of selfhosted chart. Something like this, https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/fluentd-elasticsearch#deprecated---fluentd-elasticsearch

[maorfr]

https://github.com/helm/charts/blob/master/PROCESSES.md#deprecating-a-chart

[ewbankkit]

@bhavin192 / @rhysemmas I can do that.
Issue: helm/charts#16664.