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Lab 20: Platform Engineering

Field Value
Tier 4 — Advanced
Estimated Time 90 minutes
Prerequisites k3s cluster, Helm
Auto-Grade Yes

Scenario

Your company has 30 development teams, each deploying their own microservices. Every team reinvents the wheel: writing their own Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring dashboards, and alerting rules. Deployments are inconsistent, half the teams have no health checks, and there is no standard way to create a new service.

The CTO has asked you to build an internal developer platform. The first deliverable is a "service template" — a Helm chart that any team can use to deploy a standard microservice with all the best practices baked in: deployment with resource limits, health checks, HPA, PDB, service, ingress, monitoring annotations, and network policies. Teams only need to provide a few values (image, port, replicas) and they get a production-ready deployment.

Objectives

  • Create a Helm chart service-template in /tmp/lab-platform/charts/
  • Chart deploys: Deployment, Service, HPA, PDB, and ServiceAccount
  • Chart uses values.yaml with sensible defaults (image, replicas, resources, port)
  • Chart includes health check probes (configurable via values)
  • Chart adds Prometheus scrape annotations when metrics.enabled: true
  • Deploy two instances of the chart with different values (team-alpha, team-beta)
  • Both instances are running in namespace lab-platform

Setup

./setup.sh

Creates the working directory and namespace.

Hints

Hint 1: Helm chart structure 
charts/service-template/
  Chart.yaml
  values.yaml
  templates/
    deployment.yaml
    service.yaml
    hpa.yaml
    pdb.yaml
    serviceaccount.yaml
Hint 2: Templating values Use `{{ .Values.image.repository }}:{{ .Values.image.tag }}` in templates. Use `{{ .Release.Name }}` for resource names to support multiple instances.
Hint 3: Conditional Prometheus annotations 
{{- if .Values.metrics.enabled }}
annotations:
  prometheus.io/scrape: "true"
  prometheus.io/port: "{{ .Values.metrics.port }}"
{{- end }}
Hint 4: Installing two instances 
helm install team-alpha ./charts/service-template -n lab-platform -f alpha-values.yaml
helm install team-beta ./charts/service-template -n lab-platform -f beta-values.yaml
Hint 5: Default values Good defaults make the chart usable without any custom values. Set image to `nginx:alpine`, replicas to 2, port to 80, memory limit to 128Mi.

Grading

./grade.sh

Solution

See the solution/ directory for the complete Helm chart.