Returning to the 101 ways to create Kubernetes configuration theme, next up is ksonnet from the folks at Heptio. (I have no doubt that there are 101 ways to create Kubernetes configuration but I’m afraid I don’t really intend to cover all of them on this blog!) ksonnet has a different take yet again from Helm and kustomize. In many ways, it is more powerful than either of them but that power comes at the cost of a fairly steep learning curve.
The name is derived from Jsonnet, a data templating language that came out of Google back in 2014. Jsonnet essentially extends JSON with a scripting syntax that supports the definition of programming constructs such as variables, functions, and objects. The ‘Aha!’ moment for me with ksonnet was in realizing that it could be used as a simple template structure in much the same way as Helm. You start with some Kubernetes configuration in JSON format (and yq is your friend if you need to convert from YAML to JSON first) and from there you can extract parameters. I say ‘it could’ because you’d typically only take this approach if you were actually converting existing configuration but realizing this helped me get beyond some of the slightly strange syntax you see in generated files.
As usual, Homebrew is your starting point: brew install ksonnet/tap/ks. ksonnet has an understanding of the different environments to which an application is deployed and, when you issue ks init myapp, it takes the cluster that your current kube config is pointing at as the default environment (although you can override this with --context).
ksonnet then has the concept of ‘prototypes’ which are templates for generating particular types of application component when supplied with suitable parameters. These are provided by ‘packages’ which, in turn, come from a ‘registry’ stored on GitHub. Stealing from the tutorial, we can generate code for a simple deployment and service with the deployed-service prototype giving the image name and service type as parameters e.g.
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ks generate deployed-service guestbook-ui \ --image gcr.io/heptio-images/ks-guestbook-demo:0.1 \ --type ClusterIP |
At this point, we can use ks show default to return the YAML that would be generated or ks show apply to actually apply it to the default environment. I highly recommend doing the tutorial first and not the web-based tour as it shows you that you can get a long way with ksonnet without actually editing, or even looking at, any of the generated files. For example, you can use ks env add to create another environment and then ks param set to override the values of parameters for a particular environment as you might with Helm or kustomize.
Of course, the real power comes when you drop into the code and make use of ksonnet features like parts and modules to enable greater reuse of configuration in your application. At that point though, you really should take the time to learn jsonnet properly!