Elastic launches Helm Charts (alpha) for faster deployment of Elasticsearch and Kibana to Kubernetes

At the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon happening at Seattle this week, Elastic N.V., the pioneer behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced the alpha availability of Helm Charts for Elasticsearch on Kubernetes. Helm Charts will make it possible to deploy Elasticsearch and Kibana to Kubernetes almost instantly.

Developers use Helm charts for its flexibility in creating, publishing and sharing Kubernetes applications. The ease of using Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads has also lead to Elastic users deploying their ElasticSearch workloads to Kubernetes. Now, with the Helm chart support provided for Elasticsearch on Kubernetes, developers can harness the benefits of both, Helm charts and Kubernetes, to instal, configure, upgrade and run their applications on Kubernetes.

With this new functionality in place, users can now take advantage of the best practices and templates to deploy Elasticsearch and Kibana. They will obtain access to some basic free features like monitoring, Kibana Canvas and spaces. According to the blog post, Helm charts will serve as a “ way to help enable Elastic users to run the Elastic Stack using modern, cloud-native deployment models and technologies.”

Why should developers consider Helm charts?

Helm charts have been known to provide users with the ability to leverage Kubernetes packages through the click of a button or single CLI command. Kubernetes is sometimes complex to use, thus impairing developer productivity. Helm charts improve their productivity as follows:

1. With helm charts, developers can focus on developing applications rather than  deploying dev-test environments. They can author their own chart, which in turn automates deployment of their dev-test environment
2. It comes with a “push button” deployment and deletion of apps, making adoption and development of Kubernetes apps easier for those with little container or microservices experience.
3. Combating the complexity related of deploying a Kubernetes-orchestrated container application, Helm Charts allows software vendors and developers to preconfigure their applications with sensible defaults. This enables users/deployers to change parameters of the application/chart using a consistent interface.
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4. Developers can incorporate production-ready packages while building applications in a Kubernetes environment thus eliminating deployment errors due to incorrect configuration file entries or mangled deployment recipes.
5. Deploying and maintaining Kubernetes applications can be tedious and error prone. Helm Charts reduces the complexity of maintaining an App Catalog in a Kubernetes environment.
6. Central App Catalog reduces duplication of charts (when shared within or between organizations) and spreads best practices by encoding them into Charts.

To know more about Helm charts, check out the README files for the Elasticsearch and Kibana charts available on GitHub.

In addition to this announcement, Elastic also announced its collaboration with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to promote and support open cloud native technologies and companies. This is another step towards Elastic’s mission towards building products in an open and transparent way.

You can head over to Elastic’s official blog for an in-depth coverage of this news. Alternatively, check out MarketWatch for more insights on this article.

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