RFC00002 Kubernetes Deployment with Helm Charts for BharatMLStack

[rajugupta15]

RFC: Kubernetes Deployment with Helm Charts for BharatMLStack

Metadata

• Title: Kubernetes Deployment Strategy using Helm Charts for BharatMLStack
• Author: Raju Gupta
• Status: Draft
• Created: 2025-07-26
• Last Updated: 2025-07-26
• Repository: Meesho/BharatMLStack
• Target Release: v1.0.0
• Discussion Channel: #infra-dev

🎯 Motivation

BharatMLStack powers core ML infrastructure — including Online Feature Store, Horizon (control plane backend), and Trufflebox UI — to support high-throughput inference, training, and real-time feature retrieval.

The current deployment methods are manual and component-specific, making it hard to:

• Standardize deployment patterns across components.
• Onboard new contributors or operators quickly.
• Maintain consistent security and observability standards.

A Helm-based deployment approach is needed to:

• Simplify deployment for ML engineers and data scientists.
• Enable consistent configuration as code across all environments.
• Support production-grade scaling (VPA,HPA, PDB, Gateway routing).
• Adopt cloud-native best practices from the start.

✅ Goals

• Provide modular Helm charts for core components:
  Online Feature Store, Horizon and Trufflebox UI.
• Support Ingress (default) and Gateway API (production-ready routing).
• Embed security & observability best practices (RBAC, NetworkPolicy, ServiceMonitor).
• Enable environment-specific overrides (values-dev.yaml, values-prod.yaml).
• Provide a contributor-friendly structure (clear templates, tests, CI-ready).

🚫 Non-Goals

• Provisioning Kubernetes clusters or cloud infrastructure.
• Managing third-party services (Redis, Scylla, Postgres) beyond optional values.
• Providing GitOps or CI/CD pipelines (only chart testing and linting).
• Combining components into a single “umbrella chart” (initial phase is modular).

🧱 Proposed Directory Structure

The Helm charts are modularized per core component for independent development, deployment, and scaling.
Each component explicitly supports Ingress and Gateway API (Gateway + HTTPRoute).

bharatmlstack/helm/
├── online-feature-store/                  # Core real-time feature store
│   ├── Chart.yaml
│   ├── values.yaml
│   ├── values-dev.yaml
│   ├── values-prod.yaml
│   └── templates/
│       ├── deployment.yaml
│       ├── service.yaml
│       ├── ingress.yaml
│       ├── gateway.yaml
│       ├── httproute.yaml
│       ├── configmap.yaml
│       ├── secret.yaml
│       ├── hpa.yaml
│       ├── vpa.yaml
│       ├── networkpolicy.yaml
│       ├── servicemonitor.yaml
│       ├── pdb.yaml
│       └── tests/
│           ├── latency-test.yaml
│           └── api-test.yaml

├── horizon/                               # Control plane backend
│   ├── Chart.yaml
│   ├── values.yaml
│   ├── values-dev.yaml
│   ├── values-prod.yaml
│   └── templates/
│       ├── deployment.yaml
│       ├── service.yaml
│       ├── ingress.yaml
│       ├── gateway.yaml
│       ├── httproute.yaml
│       ├── configmap.yaml
│       ├── secret.yaml
│       ├── hpa.yaml
│       ├── vpa.yaml
│       ├── networkpolicy.yaml
│       ├── servicemonitor.yaml
│       ├── pdb.yaml
│       └── tests/
│           └── api-test.yaml

├── trufflebox-ui/                         # Management console
│   ├── Chart.yaml
│   ├── values.yaml
│   ├── values-dev.yaml
│   ├── values-prod.yaml
│   └── templates/
│       ├── deployment.yaml
│       ├── service.yaml
│       ├── ingress.yaml
│       ├── gateway.yaml
│       ├── httproute.yaml
│       ├── configmap.yaml
│       ├── secret.yaml
│       ├── hpa.yaml
│       ├── vpa.yaml
│       ├── networkpolicy.yaml
│       ├── servicemonitor.yaml
│       ├── pdb.yaml
│       └── tests/
│           └── ui-availability.yaml

🌐 Ingress and Gateway API Support

Why Both?

• Ingress (NGINX/Traefik) → Default, widely supported, ideal for dev/local.
• Gateway API → Kubernetes future standard, ideal for production-grade routing, traffic-splitting, and multi-tenant use cases.

Example Values

ingress:
  enabled: true
  className: "nginx"
  host: bharatmlstack.local

gateway:
  enabled: false
  className: "istio"
  host: bharatmlstack.prod.com
  tls:
    enabled: true
    secretName: bharatmlstack-tls

📝 Contribution Workflow

• Fork the repository and work under bharatmlstack/helm/<component>/.
• Run helm lint and helm template before raising PRs.
• Update/add Helm test hooks in templates/tests/.
• Ensure changes work with KinD or Minikube (CI will validate).
• Update values-*.yaml for new configs.