Helm charts vs ansible-playbook vs k8s operator in system installation

Question

I have a big and fairly complex system for install into the k8s cluster.

60 microservices and 10 helm charts installed to 5 namespaces.

Currently, we run 5 helm install/upgrade commands with a pause of 30 seconds between commands. However, this strategy incurs a serious load on nodes due to the fact that we pull docker images and start applications. We have a long and not clear execution time(timeline) that often results in timeouts of components such as consul, Elasticsearch, and applications that depend on the aforementioned components.

I would like to hear opinions about ways to turn this situation around. First, here is our approach so far:

1. Write the script that controls installation by helm charts.
2. Write an ansible-playbook that runs Helm charts and controls the installation status of components.
3. Write an ansible-playbook install components (either using Jinja2 templates or Golang templates)
4. Write the k8s operator that installs components and controls the system status.

Answer 1

To answer my own question, I created an installation that can be used as a quick solution to fairly complex installations.

The solution relies on Ansible as an installation orchestrator and Helm as a package manager.

You can browse my github repo contains the code.