How to release helm chart to another kubernetes cluster

[alex-lx]

The background
We're using Aliyun Service Mesh(ASM) for istio. ASM deploys istio control plane on its own kubernetes cluster and we (the client) are only allowed to operate istio's CRDs like VirtualService on it, so we're not able to deploy a helm controller on it.
But we still want to use helm to release our istio's CRDs.
Use plain helm, SQL storage backend might be able to do this (while we have not tried this).
Is It anyway possible with flux?

[stefanprodan]

Flux can manage Helm releases on remote clusters as long as they are accessible from the cluster where Flux runs. Docs here: https://fluxcd.io/docs/components/helm/helmreleases/#remote-clusters--cluster-api

[alex-lx]

Sorry to bother again, It saysThe Helm storage is stored on the remote cluster, however, we're not able to create secret or configmap on the remote cluster. Is it possible to store Helm storage on the local cluster or the SQL storage backend?

[hiddeco]

This is not possible at present, for SQL storage support, please open an issue in the helm-controller repository.

Can't guarantee it will be added in the near future, but would be useful to track interest.

[stefanprodan]

@alex-lx the only way to do this with Flux right now is by running helm template in CI and pushing the resulting manifests to a Git branch, then you can use a Flux Kustomization to reconcile the manifests on remote clusters: https://fluxcd.io/docs/components/kustomize/kustomization/#remote-clusters--cluster-api

[alex-lx]

@hiddeco Got it, hope it could be supported in some days, anyway, thanks for point out this~

[alex-lx]

@stefanprodan Thanks, I'll try it.