Deployment

Shepherd enables the easy creation and management of Helm charts for Kubernetes deployments.

Helm Chart Creation

Shepherd enables the easy creation of Helm charts using a web interface. These Helm charts act as an installer for your customer to deploy an application into a their Kubernetes cluster. Helm charts contain references to the containers used by your application as well as the customer-specific metadata and secrets that are required for it to function.

To get started and create a Helm chart navigate to app.trustshepherd.com and create an account.

Navigate to Deployments in the left nav menu and create a new application. This application needs a name, which is unchangeable and is used to name the Helm chart repository, and an optional description.

After creating your application you need to register the services required for it to run. Create a new service and assign it a name and a docker image reference with a version tag. Note that the :latest tag is not permitted for the docker image reference to guarantee a specific version runs for debugging purposes. Then, assign the resources that your service will require using the RAM and CPU sliders. Finally, register environment variables which should not contain sensitive values, and secrets such as API keys and passwords. Click create to register the service, and repeat this process for as many services as are required for your application.

Publish your application after all the required services have been created. This will create a numbered version of your application in your Helm repository.

New versions of your application can be created by selecting new version in the left nav menu. New versions are typically created for different customers who have unique environment variables, secrets, and resource requirements.

Supported Deployment Targets

Below is a table of our supported environments. The generated Helm charts may work correctly in environments not listed below, but we don't guarantee 100% compatibility.

We are working to add new supported deployment targets as quickly as possible. If you require an additional target not listed below, please reach out to [e-mail].

Feature	GKE (GCP)	EKS (AWS)	AKS (Azure)
Deployment	✅	✅	Coming Soon
Secrets	✅	✅	Coming Soon
Environment Variables	✅	✅	Coming Soon
Volumes	✅	✅	Coming Soon
Exposed Ports	✅	✅	Coming Soon
Internet Facing Ingress	✅ (with GCE Load Balancer)	✅ (with AWS Load Balancer Controller)	Coming Soon
Certificate Provisioning (HTTPS)	✅ (for GCP Managed Certificates)	✅ (for AWS Managed Certificates)	Coming Soon
Internal VPC Ingress	✅	✅	Coming Soon

Helm Chart Repository

Helm charts that have been created using Shepherd are versioned and managed in the Helm chart repository. Every version of the application's Helm chart is visible in the left nav menu after selecting an application from the deployment list.

Running a Deployment

You are ready to deploy to a customer Kubernetes cluster once a Helm chart has been created.

To run a deployment run the two commands visible in the Helm repository. First helm repo add, then helm install. Parameters for these commands are provided in the Shepherd repository page.