Importing Helm Charts

[iliapolo]

---

• Hit the like (👍) or dislike (👎) button to let us know what you think about this feature.
• Feel free to ask any clarifying questions or suggest enhancements.
• This is just a proposal and intentionally doesn’t focus on technical details but rather on customer experience. If the proposal is accepted we will publish a detailed RFC where you’ll get a chance to provide more feedback.

---

Currently, customers who wish to utilize helm charts as part of their cdk8s applications can do so with the Helm construct, like so, for example:

new Helm(this, 'airflow', {
  repo: 'https://airflow.apache.org/',
  chart: 'airflow,
  version: '1.8.0',
  values: {
    airflowhome: '/opt/airflow'
  }
});

We feel there are a couple of issues with this:

1. Automatic version upgrades is somewhat awkward because it requires modifying a source code file in a non standard way.
2. The values being passed to the chart are not type checked, even if the chart actually contains a schema for its values.

To improve on this, we propose to add support for helm charts to our cdk8s import mechanism, which enables generating concrete language bindings for various kubernetes resources. With this extension, you would be able to run the following command (or similar):

cdk8s import https://airflow.apache.org/airflow@1.8.0

After the command finishes, the way to define the chart would be:

new Airflow(this, 'airflow', {
  values: {
    airflowhome: '/opt/airflow'
  }
});

Where the inputs to the values property will be validated according to the schema (if available).
This new import capability will also enable code generating and publishing cdk8s libraries that install helm charts, allowing for better version management and increased reusability.

We are also considering publishing open source helm charts as cdk8s libraries to be available in all languages and discoverable via construct hub, which will make it easier to consume them in cdk8s applications.