Setting the stage When deploying applications to Kubernetes running on an AWS, it is necessary to have an authentication mechanism which allows your applications to make signed requests to AWS resources. In the pre-container world, this would be done by assigning an IAM role to the EC2 instance doing the work. Since we could generally assume it has a 1:1 relationship between EC2 instances and applications, this approach works great. »
When deploying applications to Kubernetes, there are currently a lot of options. One of the most popular options is Helm. For those who are unfamiliar, Helm allows users to create “Charts” that define how to deploy an application. These Charts are made up of templates for things like Deployments, ConfigMaps, Secrets and other Kubernetes resources. When a Chart is installed, users of Helm select a file that defines a set of values (the values file) which are used to replace templated sections of the manifests defined in the Chart. »