There are different ways of running production services at a high scale. One popular solution for running containers in production is Kubernetes. But interacting with Kubernetes directly comes with some caveats.

Helm tries to solve some of the challenges with useful features that increase productivity and reduce maintenance efforts of complex deployments.

In this post you will learn:

• What Helm is
• The most common use-cases of Helm
• How to configure and deploy a publicly available Helm package
• How to deploy a custom application using Helm

Every code example in this post requires a Kubernetes cluster. The easiest way to get a cluster to play with is to install Docker and activate its Kubernetes cluster feature. Also, you need to install kubectl and Helm to interact with your cluster.

Please note: When you try the examples, be patient. If you are too fast then the containers are not ready. It might take a few minutes until the containers can receive requests.

What is Helm?

Helm calls itself ”The Kubernetes package manager”. It is a command-line tool that enables you to create and use so-called Helm Charts.

A Helm Chart is a collection of templates and settings that describe a set of Kubernetes resources. Its power spans from managing a single node definition to a highly scalable multi-node cluster.

The architecture of Helm has changed over the last years. The current version of Helm communicates directly to your Kubernetes cluster via Rest. If you read something about Tiller in the context of Helm, then you’re reading an old article. Tiller was removed in Helm 3.

Helm itself is stateful. When a Helm Chart gets installed, the defined resources are getting deployed and meta-information is stored in Kubernetes secrets.

#kubernetes #helm #devops