Introduction to Helm

What is Helm?

Large systems that run on Kubernetes are often comprised of many resources and must operate in multiple environments with varying configurations. Operating these systems and managing their declarative Kubernetes resource definitions is challenging for developers. Helm is a tool designed to handle this complexity, making it easier to describe, manage, and install complex applications that run on Kubernetes.

Helm serves as a package manager for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Using Helm, software developers can create, version, share, and publish a single package that contains the Kubernetes resources necessary to run their applications. Helm also provides the ability to parameterize configuration values for the Kubernetes resources within a package, allowing a single set of resource definitions to be used across multiple environments. When packaged with Helm, systems and software are easily installed across multiple Kubernetes clusters by anyone who would like to use them.

Why Helm?

Throughout the course, we've worked with a sample Python application that runs within a Docker container on Kubernetes. When we ran the application on the cluster, we had to individually apply the Kubernetes Deployment and Service resources on the cluster. ...