Armada

Armada is a tool for managing multiple Helm charts with dependencies by centralizing all configurations in a single Armada YAML and providing life-cycle hooks for all Helm releases.

Find more documentation for Armada in the Armada documentation.

Overview

The Armada Python library and command line tool provide a way to synchronize a Helm (Tiller) target with an operator's intended state, consisting of several charts, dependencies, and overrides using a single file or directory with a collection of files. This allows operators to define many charts, potentially with different namespaces for those releases, and their overrides in a central place. With a single command, deploy and/or upgrade them where applicable.

Armada also supports fetching Helm chart source and then building charts from source from various local and remote locations, such as Git endpoints, tarballs or local directories.

It will also give the operator some indication of what is about to change by assisting with diffs for both values, values overrides, and actual template changes.

Its functionality extends beyond Helm, assisting in interacting with Kubernetes directly to perform basic pre- and post-steps, such as removing completed or failed jobs, running backup jobs, blocking on chart readiness, or deleting resources that do not support upgrades. However, primarily, it is an interface to support orchestrating Helm.

Components

Armada consists of two separate but complementary components:

1. CLI component (mandatory) which interfaces directly with Tiller.
2. API component (optional) which services user requests through a wsgi server (which in turn communicates with the Tiller server) and provides the following additional functionality:
   • Role-Based Access Control.
   • Limiting projects to specific Tiller functionality by leveraging project-scoping provided by Keystone.

Installation

Quick Start (via Container)

Armada can be most easily installed as a container, which requires Docker to be executed. To install Docker, please reference the following install guide.

Afterward, you can launch the Armada container by executing:

$ sudo docker run -d --net host -p 8000:8000 --name armada \
    -v ~/.kube/config:/armada/.kube/config \
    -v $(pwd)/examples/:/examples quay.io/airshipit/armada:latest-ubuntu_bionic

Manual Installation

For a comprehensive manual installation guide, please see Manual Install Guide.

Usage

To run Armada, simply supply it with your YAML-based intention for any number of charts:

$ armada apply examples/openstack-helm.yaml [ --debug ]

Which should output something like this:

$ armada apply examples/openstack-helm.yaml 2017-02-10 09:42:36,753

  armada INFO Cloning git:
  ...

For more information on how to install and use Armada, please reference: Armada Quickstart.

Integration Points

Armada CLI component has the following integration points:

• Tiller manages Armada chart installations.
• Deckhand is one of the supported control document sources for Armada.
• Prometheus exporter is provided for metric data related to application of charts and collections of charts. See metrics.

In addition, Armada's API component has the following integration points:

• Keystone (OpenStack's identity service) provides authentication and support for role-based authorization.

Further Reading

Airship.