We have been hearing a lot about service mesh recently, coinciding with the fact that at Transit we are parting ways with our APM vendor in favour of open source monitoring tools, the time seemed right to jump on board with the “world’s most over-hyped technology".

While we were already capturing golden signals at the ingress level (check out this dashboard by @n8han that we contributed upstream), the realization that we would be losing service to service metrics prompted us to implement a mesh.

Being a GKE shop, the managed Istio add-on was very appealing, but in the end it…

Hi,

So at Transit we’ve been migrating our workloads to GKE. Naturally, we’ve been using helm to package them.

Until recently, we had a pretty OK bash script to install desired releases to various clusters, but wanted a more declarative (and readable!) approach.

My buddy (and CNCF ambassador extraordinaire) Archy told me about helmfile so we checked it out and a few hours of YAML later our bash script was history and we were using helmfile in production to manage all our releases.

Let’s take a look at what works for us.

Environments

So you can declare environments in helmfile, e.g.:

…