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Advanced Guide to Helm Charts for Package Management in Kubernetes

This is an article from DZone's 2022 Kubernetes in the Enterprise Trend Report.

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Helm is undoubtedly one of the most popular and successful open-source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Since it was introduced at the inaugural KubeCon in 2015, Helm's usage has steadily grown to solidify its status as the de facto package manager for Kubernetes. It graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2020, and in the CNCF Survey 2020, more than 60% of the survey respondents reported Helm as their preferred method for packaging Kubernetes applications. This rates significantly higher than Kustomize and other managed Kubernetes offerings. 

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How to Use Shipa to Make Kubernetes Adoption Easier for Developers

Kubernetes offers developers tremendous advantages… if they can overcome the platform’s inherent complexities. It can be a big "if." Without additional tooling, developers aren’t able to simply develop their applications on Kubernetes, but must also become experts in writing complex YAML templates to define Kubernetes resources. A relatively new tool called Shipa provides an application management framework that largely relieves developers of this burden, enabling dev teams to ship applications with no Kubernetes expertise required.

Having recently put the tool to the test, this article will demonstrate how to install and utilize Shipa to simplify Kubernetes and ease some common developer frustrations.

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Kubernetes Package Management With Helm

This is an article from DZone's 2021 Kubernetes and the Enterprise Trend Report.

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Read the Report

Introducing Helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Given a running Kubernetes cluster of any type, Helm is used to manage the deployment lifecycle of just about any type of Kubernetes resource, including the management of many Kubernetes runtime components. A very common analogy used in describing Helm is that Helm is to Kubernetes as apt is to Debian-based systems and yum or rpm is to Red Hat-based systems. Beyond package management, many aspects of configuration management are also built into Helm. Helm was initially developed by a company named Deis, which was acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft fully supported and accelerated the development of Helm, and it is now a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). 

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Introduction to Helm Charts

A package manager for Kubernetes can take care of the application packaging that is required for deployment on Kubernetes. It is an easy application installation and deployment on Kubernetes. Below are the resources you will need:

Let's say we want to run MySQL on Kubernetes. First, search for MySQL on Artifact Hub, add its rep, and install:

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Kustomize Your Kubernetes Deployments

When  you start working with Kubernetes, you may get to a point where you’re shocked at how complex your YAML files have become. For a complex application consisting of different containers your YAML files will become very very long and it will become harder to change a single piece of configuration like the name of your application without breaking things. This is also known as the YAML hell. 

A lot has already been written about how to work around this. Bash programmers write their own scripts and you may have already heard of the tool Helm Charts. I myself am not a very good Bash programmer and also I am not a friend of Helm Charts, because they only make the topic worse. The good news is that there is already an official solution called Kustomize. This declarative approach was originally a separate project which has become a part of Kubernetes since version 1.14. So there is no longer any reason to deal with endlessly long YAML files or Helm Charts if you just want to customize some details of your Kubernetes deployments. And you don not need to install any additional tools for this! 

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Navigating Kubernetes With Helm 3 Charts and ChartCenter

Many DevOps teams use Docker for secure deployments and agility, and use the popular open-source container orchestration tool known as Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, and the setup for your Kubernetes clusters can become complex. This is where the ecosystem really benefits from an additional support tool like Helm, a package manager, to streamline installing and managing Kubernetes applications. The building block when it comes to Helm based deployments are Helm Charts, and these charts are the packages managed by Helm. Helm charts are curated, reusable application definitions for Kubernetes, nothing but a curated set of files that define a related set of Kubernetes resources for an application. 

Helm 3 is one of the most eagerly anticipated releases by the Kubernetes enthusiasts. This latest version of Helm is finally available. Let’s take a look at how we got here.

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15 Useful Helm Charts Tools

Helm is one of the best things about Kubernetes. (Which is why we talk about it in great depth here.) Rather than setting up an entirely new environment and configuring each kube object manually, you can now use Helm and Helm Charts—the template for different Kubernetes setups—to automate 90% of the work. For more on Helm Charts in full and how they’re designed to be flexible and robust, don’t forget to check out our Spotlight on Helm articles first.

Helm is made even stronger with the help of a huge community of developers around it. Devs have found Helm Charts extremely useful, so they’ve begun developing tools, add-ons, and plugins for specific functions to enhance it further. Here is a compilation of some of the best Helm Charts tools you can use today.