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Using Harbor and Kubeapps to Serve Custom Helm Charts

In my last post, I walked through the process of deploying Kubeapps in an Enterprise PKS Kubernetes cluster. In this post, I wanted to examine the workflow required for utilizing Harbor, an open source cloud native registry, as an option to serve out a curated set of Helm charts to developers in an organization. We’ll walk through a couple of scenarios, including configuring a “private” project in Harbor that houses Helm charts and container images for a specific group of developers. Building on my last post, we’ll also add this new Helm chart repository into our Kubeapps deployment to allow our developers to deploy our curated applications directly from the Kubeapps dashboard.

Harbor is an an open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content. Harbor extends the open source Docker Distribution by adding the functionalities usually required by users such as security, identity and management. Having a registry closer to the build and run environment can improve the image transfer efficiency. Harbor supports replication of images between registries, and also offers advanced security features such as user management, access control and activity auditing. Enterprise support for Harbor Container Registry is included with VMware Enterprise PKS.

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Deploying Kubeapps and Exposing the Dashboard via Ingress Controller in Enterprise PKS

In this post, I’d like to take some time to walk through the process of deploying Kubeapps in an Enterprise PKS kubernetes cluster. I’ll also walk through the process of utilizing the built-in ingress controller provided by NSX-T to expose the Kubeapps dashboard via a fully qualified domain name.

What is Kubeapps?

There’s been a lot of excitement in the Cloud Native space at VMware since the acquisition of Bitnami last year. The Bitnami team has done a lot of amazing work over the years to simplify the process of application deployment across all types of infrastructure, both in public and private clouds. Today we are going to take a look at Kubeapps. Kubeapps, an open source project developed by the folks at Bitnami, is a web-based UI for deploying and managing applications in Kubernetes clusters. Kubeapps allows users to:

  • Browse and deploy Helm charts from chart repositories
  • Inspect, upgrade and delete Helm-based applications installed in the cluster
  • Add custom and private chart repositories (supports ChartMuseum and JFrog Artifactory)
  • Browse and provision external services from the Service Catalog and available Service Brokers
  • Connect Helm-based applications to external services with Service Catalog Bindings
  • Secure authentication and authorization based on Kubernetes Role-Based Access Control

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Implementing RBAC with VMware’s Container Service Extension 2.0 for vCloud Director

In case you haven’t heard, VMware recently announced the general availability of the Container Service Extension 2.0 release for vCloud Director. The biggest addition of functionality in the 2.0 release is the ability to use CSE to deploy Enterprise PKS clusters via the vcd-cli tool in addition to native, upstream Kubernetes clusters. I’ll be adding a blog post shortly on the process required for enabling your vCD environment to support Enterprise PKS deployments via the Container Service Extension.

Today, we are going to talk about utilizing the RBAC functionality introduced in CSE 1.2.6 to assign different permissions to our tenants to allow them to deploy Enterprise PKS (CSE Enterprise) clusters and/or native Kubernetes clusters (CSE Native). The cloud admin will be responsible for enabling and configuring the CSE service and enabling tenant admin/users to deploy CSE Enterprise or CSE Native clusters in their virtual datacenter(s).

Prerequisites

  • The CSE 2.0 server is installed and configured to serve up native Kubernetes clusters AND Enterprise PKS clusters. Please refer to the CSE documentation for more information on this process.
  • Must have at least two organizations present and configured in vCD. In this example, I’ll be utilizing the following orgs:
    • cse-native-org (native k8 provider)
    • cse-ent-org (PKS Enterprise k8 provider)
  • This example also assumes none of the organizations have been enabled for k8 providers up to this point. We will be starting from scratch!

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