Introduction

A short introduction to to what you’ll learn in this course.

We'll cover the following

Welcome to a course about Helm, one of the most important tools used to build cloud solutions. If you know Kubernetes, you also need to know Helm.

Why Helm?

Today, Helm is necessary for anyone who is a DevOps engineer. It is even recommended for software engineers to be familiar with its basics. 

The significance of Helm can be gauged from a simple exercise: just type its name into GitHub and see the results. Any open-source software that can be run on Docker or Kubernetes will probably have a Helm chart in its official repository. If you come across a job description for a DevOps engineer; chances are, the company will require a candidate to know Kubernetes, as well as knowledge of Helm.

Another reason why Helm is sure to become an essential skill in the coming years is that it is one of the very few graduated projects by the CNCF. Not only do regular users think that Helm is important for their work, but experts also consider Helm to be an important part of a cloud ecosystem that is mature enough to be used for production purposes.

About the course

The goal of this course is to learn about the basics of Helm. After finishing the course, you’ll be able to handle the most common use cases, like installing the software. You’ll also learn how to become a Helm chart developer and be able to install your software on the Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

This is a project-based course, which means that you’ll learn Helm concepts by creating a real-life solution. In many lessons, you’ll be asked to tackle different problems and try to solve them using one of Helm’s functionalities. By the end of this course, you’ll have a working application to deploy on a public cloud.

What will be covered

This course is split into smaller parts, each one with a different goal:

  • Getting Started: This part is just a warm-up before the essential part of the course, but as with any warm-up before an exercise, it’s also important. In it, we will have a theoretical introduction of what Helm is, what problems it solves, and how it relates to Kubernetes. Then we’ll prepare our local environment, install the necessary software, and so on.

  • Installing Public Helm Charts: Here, we’ll start to use Helm, and learn the most basic Helm CLI commands.

  • Building Custom Helm Chart: In this part, we’ll switch from being a consumer of a Helm chart to becoming its developer. 

  • Using Helm on a Cloud: In this chapter, everything that we build and test locally; we will it transfer to a public cloud.

  • Helmfile: In the last chapter, we’ll learn about another tool that is built on top of Helm and makes its maintenance even simpler.

Prerequisites

Even though this course was designed for beginners who don't have basic training inHelm, some basic knowledge of certain topics is required. First of all, we need to feel comfortable with a terminal, because most of the time we’ll be using it to install applications. Also, it would be good if we already know something about Kubernetes. In the course, we’ll introduce some of its concepts, just to be sure that we’re on the same page, but do not treat this course as a place to learn about Kubernetes.

Any knowledge of a programming language is welcomed, especially Golang, but not necessary.