Deploying kubeapps helm chart on VMware Enterprise PKS (lab deployment!)

With the recent announcement of VMware and Bitnami joining forces, I wanted to revisit the kubeapps project on Enterprise PKS earlier today. I followed the community documentation but ran into some smaller issues (see my GitHub comments here) that were coming up in the MongoDB deployment initially.

UPDATE: At first I thought you needed to enable privileged containers in PKS but actually you don’t have to do that! There was a typo in my configuration which led to an unknown flag for the MongoDB deployment. I used the flag “mongodb.securityContext.enable=false” when deploying the Helm chart but it should have been “mongodb.securityContext.enabled=false”. Thanks to Andres from the Bitnami team for catching this! The instructions below have been updated!

Install Helm

Add the bitnami repo:

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

Add a “kubeapps” namespace to deploy into

kubectl create namespace kubeapps

Add a Service Account to Tiller

vi rbac-config-tiller.yaml
---
apiVersion: v1
 kind: ServiceAccount
 metadata:
   name: tiller
   namespace: kube-system
 apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
 kind: ClusterRoleBinding
 metadata:
   name: tiller
 roleRef:
   apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
   kind: ClusterRole
   name: cluster-admin
 subjects:
 kind: ServiceAccount
 name: tiller
 namespace: kube-system 
---
kubectl create -f rbac-config-tiller.yaml

Leverage newly created service account for Tiller:

helm init --service-account tiller

Create Service account for kubeapps-operator

kubectl create serviceaccount kubeapps-operator 

kubectl create clusterrolebinding kubeapps-operator \
--clusterrole=cluster-admin \
--serviceaccount=default:kubeapps-operator

kubectl get secret $(kubectl get serviceaccount kubeapps-operator -o jsonpath='{.secrets[].name}') -o jsonpath='{.data.token}' | base64 --decode

Copy the secret for use in the kubeapps dashboard later on.

Since NSX-T brings an out-of-the-box capability for exposing kubeapps to an external IP address, we can use LoadBalancer and skip the port-forwarding section of the documentation. Following what I found in another bug, I set some extra flags for disabling IPv6:

helm install --name kubeapps --namespace kubeapps bitnami/kubeapps \
--set frontend.service.type=LoadBalancer \
--set mongodb.securityContext.enabled=false \
--set mongodb.mongodbEnableIPv6=false

After a few minutes, the deployed services & deployments should be up and running:

Follow then part three of the instructions to access the dashboard.