Add a Helm Chart for cloudcost-exporter

[nikimanoledaki]

Feature Request

Issue to add a Helm Chart for cloudcost-exporter ✨

Acceptance Criteria

• A user should be able to deploy cloudcost-exporter through a Helm Chart
• A user should also be able to configure a set of values with sensible defaults

TODO

• Bootstrap cloudclost-exporter Helm chart in grafana/cloudcost-exporter repo
• Add a cloudcost-exporter dir & README to grafana/helm-charts e.g. https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/cloudcost-exporter
• Publish a release of the cloudcost-exporter Helm Chart to grafana/helm-charts e.g. https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/releases/tag/k8s-monitoring-2.0.2 - workflow
• Validate that the cloudcost-exporter Helm Chart shows up when searching for it through helm search repo grafana

[Pokom]

@nikimanoledaki do you think we should create a repo specific to the helm chart? I've seen a mixture of patterns out in the OSS community. We could always start with a helm chart within this repo and expand.

[nikimanoledaki]

We could use the Helm chart repository that is maintained under the Grafana organization, create a new charts/cloudcost-exporter in this repo, and add @platform-monitoring in the CODEOWNERS: https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/charts

[Pokom]

I wonder why the k8s-monitoring team opted to create their own repo: https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/k8s-monitoring, https://github.com/grafana/k8s-monitoring-helm?

Do you mind reaching out in #k8s-monitoring to get a bit more context? That should help us make a more informed opinion on sticking with the grafana helm-charts repo vs rolling our own.

[nikimanoledaki]

Very good point - I hadn't seen that 👀 Will investigate and report back!

[nikimanoledaki]

Helm Chart repository & git repository

Grafana Labs products use the https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts Helm chart repository. This can be validated with the following (which is also where cloudcost-exporter should be added):

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm search repo grafana

Apps that are maintained by both GL and the community are also listed in this helm chart repository, such as prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack.

The most common pattern that I found is for the source code of the helm chart to live in the same git repository as the rest of the application's source code. Examples:

• The Grafana Agent is a pretty similar case to the cloudcost-exporter imo: https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/grafana-agent
• Another example is Loki, which is listed here https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/loki but has the Helm Chart's source code close to the application's source code in grafana/loki.
• Similar case with Mimir: https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/operations/helm/charts/mimir-distributed/README.md

It seems that the k8s-monitoring-helm is in a separate git repo because it contains a collection of helm charts, which I see almost as a feature (or collection of features?) in itself: https://github.com/grafana/k8s-monitoring-helm/tree/main/charts/k8s-monitoring/charts. Having a separate dedicated repo makes sense there since that collection of Helm charts is a large project.

For our use case, let's bootstrap the helm chart in this repo. Keeping things in this repo will help with reviews and creating changes in both the app's source code and the Helm chart at the same time if needed which would be faster than two separate repos.

Added a TODO to the description - might turn the TODO list into sub-issues as I go along

[Pokom]

Thanks @nikimanoledaki for the research!

For our use case, let's bootstrap the helm chart in this repo. Keeping things in this repo will help with reviews and creating changes in both the app's source code and the Helm chart at the same time if needed which would be faster than two separate repos.

That works for me. As always, if we find it problematic, then we can move to helm chart over to a dedicated repository.

[nikimanoledaki]

The Helm chart lives in this branch: https://github.com/grafana/cloudcost-exporter/tree/nm/add-helm-chart

Next steps:

1. add instructions to contributing guide on how to test locally in a kind cluster
2. setup authentication manifests (prioritize AWS, then GCP, then Azure)
3. test internally in dev
4. setup releases so that the Helm chart can be fetched through the Grafana Helm repository
5. merge nm/add-helm-chart to main