Introduction

In this article we will see how to benefit from the advantages of two infrastructure and template management solutions: Helm charts and Terraform.

In order to make the exercise challenging and to prove that the use of these two features works well, I deliberately chose to use the SecretProviderClass because it is a complex Kubernetes resource type to model.

For more details on the SecretProviderClass, please consult the following article that points out how to create a SecretProviderClass using user-assigned identity to access your key vault.

All the code used in this article is available here on GitHub: JamesDLD/terraform-azurerm_kubernetes-helm-chart-SecretProviderClass

Prerequisite

• Access to an existing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.
• You already have configured the Azure Key Vault provider for Secrets Store CSI Driver in an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.

Terraform providers & authentication

The trick here is to retrieve the Kubernetes certificate from the azurerm_kubernetes_cluster resource and pass it to the helm provider.

Terraform Helm release

In this section we highlight the following tips:

1. Use Helm values files.
2. Pass parameters from Terraform to the Helm chart through the “set” function.
3. Dynamically retrieve the Azure Tenant ID from Terraform and pass it to the Helm chart.

Helm chart template

The following manifest file manages the Kubernetes SecretProviderClass object and was designed using the following requirements:

1. Ability to create multiple SecretProviderClass Kubernetes objects using the range action.
2. Use in order of preference the values ​​provided by the current “range” (file “value-demo.yaml”), then the default values ​​(file “value.yaml”) then those provided by Terraform (“set” function).