Baremetal Kubernetes Cluster - Helm

This is part of a series on creating a Kubernetes cluster. In the previous post, we finalized the cluster by joining the worker nodes. In this post, we’ll add one additional tool to our master node to help with Kubernetes (k8s) deployments.

Helm is a package manager for k8s, which makes it easy to deploy applications using a package, called a [chart](https://helm.sh/docs/developing_charts/), that someone else has built. To install Helm, use the command below.

curl -L https://git.io/get_helm.sh | bash

Once Helm has installed, initialize it with helm init.

There are two parts to Helm: The Helm client (helm) and the Helm server (tiller). The server does the work to configure the cluster, so it needs to be granted permission to be a cluster admin.

First, create a service account for tiller.

kubectl create serviceaccount tiller --namespace kube-system

Then, create a tiller-clusterrolebinding.yaml file with these contents:

kind: ClusterRoleBinding
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: tiller-clusterrolebinding
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: tiller
  namespace: kube-system
roleRef:
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
  apiGroup: ""

Finally, deploy the ClusterRoleBinding, and init Helm again to use the service account.

kubectl create -f tiller-clusterrolebinding.yaml
helm init --service-account tiller --upgrade

Helm will be very useful in the future as we deploy additional components to our cluster. But first, we need to give our cluster some persistent storage.