GitLab has dreamed of “Any Cloud, One Command” with Kubernetes’ scaling and resiliency. Helm’s complex templating capabilities has enabled us to create a user experience less daunting than deploying over 5000 lines of YAML directly.

Despite the simplicity of “apt-get install gitlab-ee”, GitLab is not a single application. It is a massive weaving of many intertwined components. GitLab has customers with 20 through 20K users, and our charts are capable of scaling to either size with ease.

In this talk, we will share the business needs that drove us to any cloud, one command. We will describe our work to build a chart combining 13 sub-charts and 9 dependencies into something that can be configured with as little as a single command. We’ll will offer our insight & practices (particularly where deviating from Helm & Kubernetes standard practices) that will help anyone start a complex chart.