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What are Component Deployments?

Components are a convenience deployment method of DevSpace to deploy common Kubernetes resources without the hassle of defining complex kubernetes yamls or helm chart. A component is nothing else than a very dynamic Helm chart which allows you to specify Kubernetes resources as part of the Helm values for this chart.

You can define components in the deployment section of your devspace.yaml. A basic component looks like this:

deployments:
- name: quickstart-nodejs
  helm:
    componentChart: true
    values:
      containers:
      - image: dscr.io/username/image
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: "400m"
            memory: "500Mi"

Using componentChart: true is equivalent to the chart definition shown here:

helm:
  chart:                                # Helm chart to be deployed
    name: component-chart               # DevSpace component chart is a general-purpose Helm chart
    version: v0.0.6                     # This version is tied to the version of the DevSpace binary (allows to upgrade chart through the CLI)
    repo: https://charts.devspace.cloud

The advantage of using componentChart: true is that DevSpace will automatically validate your values for this deployment and also upgrade these config options if they may change over time in a newer version of the chart.

Types of components

There are two types of components:

• Predefined components
• Custom components

Predefined components

Predefined components allow you to add popular application components such as databases (e.g. mysql, mongodb) without having to manually define everything from scratch. DevSpace will ask you a couple of questions when adding a predefined component and automatically configure everything for you.

Custom components

Custom components allow you to define components for your own application components or for additional applications which are not available as predefined component, yet.

How are components deployed?

DevSpace deploys components using Helm. The chart that will be deployed is the DevSpace Component Helm Chart and the values for the chart are specified directly under the component key in respective deployment within your devspace.yaml.

DevSpace Component Helm Chart

The DevSpace Component Helm Chart is a general purpose Helm chart. Unlike other Helm charts which are designed to deploy one specific application (e.g. a mysql database), the DevSpace Component Helm Chart is more like a base chart that allows you to deploy any application. The benefits of using the DevSpace Component Helm Chart are:

• Much easier configuration than plain Kubernetes manifests
• Smart defaults and best practices (e.g. pods with persistent volumes will automatically be deployed as StatefulSets instead of Deployments)
• Much easier configuration than writing your own Helm chart
• Better deployment lifecycle management through Helm in comparison to plain Kubernetes manifests, including:
  • Tracking of Kubernetes resources of a deployment
  • Well-defined upgrade mechanism
  • Rollbacks when upgrades fail
  • Fast cleanup when removing deployments