Deploying Helm Apps to Kubernetes with Waypoint and GitOps

The version 0.6 release of HashiCorp Waypoint focused on Kubernetes and added features that support and improve the interaction process around deploying and releasing applications to a cluster. With the new Helm plugin and existing Git integration present in Waypoint, practitioners can use GitOps to automatically deploy Helm applications to their cluster whenever they make a change to their code repository.

Read on to learn more about these two key features and how to use them to deploy your applications quicker and more easily to Kubernetes with our new HashiCorp Learn tutorial.

»Helm Deployment Plugin

The Helm plugin simplifies the Helm deployment process by abstracting away the individual helm install and helm update commands and integrating them into waypoint up — the one command that takes care of the entire build, deploy, and release process.

For applications consisting of multiple individual services, this removes the one-to-one requirement between a service and the Helm commands that need to be executed to deploy the service.

»Git Integration

Waypoint has been able to integrate with Git repositories since version 0.3, which allows you to incorporate Waypoint into GitOps workflows, as shown here:

This lowers the barrier to entry for continuous application integration and deployment by simplifying the CI/CD process to a single file: waypoint.hcl. Waypoint polls the repository for changes and automatically executes any build, deploy, and release processes defined in the waypoint.hcl file — no additional scripts needed.

»Try It Out with HashiCups

Since Waypoint can deploy to several different platforms, including Docker, HashiCorp Nomad, and Amazon EC2, you can apply the knowledge from the Git integration to automate your release process in a wide variety of environments.

Get hands-on with Waypoint, the Helm plugin, and GitOps in the latest Waypoint Learn guide: Deploy a Helm-based application automatically with GitOps. By the end of it, you’ll have a working GitOps workflow that deploys the HashiCups example application with Helm (shown below). If you have a Helm-based application ready to go, the steps in the tutorial can easily be adapted to deploy that instead of HashiCups.