Introducing HULL! [VC UG]

No, not the birthplace of the boiled sweet, the LCD and Lemsip in the north of England, but the “Helm Uniform Layer Library” - an Open Source helper library that can streamline large-scale cloud and on-premise deployment workflows that utilize Kubernetes and Helm.

A project initiated by Google, Kubernetes has become the defacto standard orchestration platform for hosting complex software applications in the cloud. In order to install software in a Kubernetes cluster, it first needs to be suitably packaged together and configured for the particular customers it is intended for. Helm is a tool being developed under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that provides the means to package, configure and install software applications in Kubernetes clusters. In the Helm terminology, a package build around an application for deployment is called a Helm Chart.

While Helm is an extremely powerful and flexible tool when it comes to creating tailormade configurations for applications, it does not support recurring demands arising in off the shelf use-cases very well. This is the gap that HULL intends to close. HULL is an enhancement of Helm which in itself comes as a Helm Chart - more precisely a library Helm Chart - you can include in your existing Helm Charts. Analogous to a program library or DLL it provides helper functions to ease packaging and configuring applications.

Integrating HULL into your Helm Charts enables features absent in the regular Helm tooling including:

• Minimizing most boilerplate code from the regular work with Helm Charts

• Providing a single, well-documented configurational interface for all Helm Charts you create instead of making each Helm chart a “unicorn” in terms of configuration

• Validating all objects created by HULL  against the Kubernetes API specification

• Automatically enhancing all created Kubernetes objects with standard metadata without having to write a single line of configuration

• Integrating ConfigMaps and Secrets into your Helm Chart with a few lines of code
  

Vidispine has long supported the developer community with advanced toolkits and APIs to integrate and extend our applications and services. We knew that the challenges that led us to build HULL aren’t unique to us, and us such, we want to make sure that HULL is free to use for everyone as an Open Source offering under the Apache license.

Want to learn more?

Head to our GitHub page and grab a copy of the HULL chart to learn more and improve your deployment experience.