Designing Helm charts for microservices based application

Question

I\'m currently building an application that is composed of 4 microservices (a, b, c, d). We would like to make Kubernetes Helm part of our CI/CD pipeline.

We are at the

Answer 1

Might be a late answer, but FWIW, it depends on how and where you develop your microservices app. If each microservice has it's own repo and CI pipeline, then it makes sense to separate the charts as well (one per service). However, if all services are in the same repo and deployed with a single ci pipeline, then a single chart is a better fit.

All your 4 options will work. And whether you deploy your app with separate charts or with one won't make any difference as long as eventually all your services will be deployed.

As for scaling services independently, if you use separate deployments for your services in one big chart, you can scale them separately by using input values for each deployment in your values.yaml ... so it's not something which forces you to split your charts.

And for your image changing question in the comments, it only needs an upgrade for your installed release with the new image tag.

By the way, We use helmsman for deploying (and managing) helm charts from code in our CI/CD pipelines. Might be useful for you ;)