When you are packaging your application for Kubernetes, you generally have two options:

• Helm uses templates and a package manager-like approach to bundle applications as “charts”.
• Kustomize allows you to patch your original resources to produce new manifests and reach the desired configuration.

However, Helm and Kustomize are not mutually exclusive and you may benefit from both of them at the same time. For example, you could generate the bulk of your resources using Helm templating and do some ad hoc patching using Kustomize on the generated manifests.

Whatever technology you are using, you build charts or “Kustomization” to package your applications. Then, you can distribute them, but are you sure they are working as intended? Can they be deployed without error in a Kubernetes cluster? Or in your customers’ clusters with their variety of API versions?

In this article, I will show you how to build, test, and continuously deploy your Helm applications against real Kubernetes clusters.

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