Helm chart and examples using Terraform with Kubernetes

Development Approved RFCs
#1

Summary: Provide a Helm chart to facilitate the adoption of bors on a self-hosted manner

I allow this RFC document to be modified and redistributed under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license, or the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, at your option.

Motivation

As part of a company initiative to improve our security and manage better our costs we have moved our bors-ng deployment from Heroku into one of our private Kubernetes clusters. As part of that effort we have experimented and generated some Terraform code and Helm charts to achieve the same goal which is getting bors-ng running on a Kubernetes cluster. Since all this effort is not bounded in any way to the company we have decided to donate these Terraform snippets and Helm chart to bors-ng since we are benefitting from the application.

This is specially useful for operator (like myself)

Guide-level explanation

The code to add is not related to the application bors-ng on per se but the way it's run on the container orchestrator Kubernetes. A PR (link at the bottom) has already been created. The code included on the PR contains:

  • Helm chart v2 (Helm 3 compatible only)

  • Terraform snippet to deploy on Kubernetes using kubernetes provider

  • Terraform snippet to deploy on Kubernetes using helm provider and the chart included here

Reference-level explanation

As explained before this RFC does not affects the bors-ng code instead adds a couple of ways to easily deploy bors-ng on Kubernetes using some of the most popular tooling to manage infrastructure and Kubernetes

Drawbacks

  • More code to maintain

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rationale and alternatives

  • Why is this design the best in the space of possible designs?

  • What other designs have been considered and what is the rationale for not choosing them?

  • What is the impact of not doing this?

Prior art

  • Heroku one click deployment

  • docker cli command to run bors on a container

Unresolved questions

  • Publishing the chart on a Helm repository. An option has been suggested on the PR mentioned below using Helm chart releaser and Github Pages making the hosting free and automated

Future possibilities

  • Adding bors-ng Helm repository to CNCF Artifacthub (searchable index for many Helm chart repositories)

  • Helm chart compatible with Openshift

  • Terraform modules addded to the hashicorp registry

  • This could help to improve bors-ng adoption

See also

2 Likes
#2

I'm a big fan of this and was something I was likely going to contribute in a few weeks here once we finished up our production deployment. We are also deploying on a Kubernetes cluster, and I can certainly say that it would have been useful to have an existing chart/example to reuse rather than writing one from scratch.

#3

One thing to note, you can't run multiple instances of bors (which is normally how k8s deployment works)

#5

Thanks for confirming what I was suspecting.

There are many ways to make sure there only 1 replica of bors running at any given time.
In this case, using Deployment strategy "Recreate" and forcing replicas = 1 and not configurable

I'll update the PR chart to ensure that

#6

I'm glad to see that we've worked these things out.

This RFC is entering FCP. Disposition: accept. If there is any reason why this should not be accepted, speak now or forever hold your peace.

1 Like
#7

https://bors.tech/rfcs/0566-helm-chart-and-examples-using-terraform-with-kubernetes.html