cloudposse
What are people using helm for?
question
- What are people using helm for? I understand it as a concept of charts, etc...
answer
TL;DR: deployments into kubernetes
helm is like npm for kubernetes or like a module for terraform. You can represent all the resources required for an application as a cohesive unit that is parameterized and templatized so you can install it multiple times. it also comes with a dependency management system, so you can require other charts. It helps to think of kubernetes like a cluster-aware operating system. So instead of installing an application on just one node, you’re installing an application across multiple nodes. For a traditional OS, we’ve always relied on package managers. helm solves the equivalent problem but for kubernetes.
A chart is just a package. Under the hood, it’s a gzipped tarball that contains some metadata about the application (name, version, dependencies) and then some go templates of kubernetes resources.
Here are some examples of charts:
- Maintained by cloudposse: https://github.com/cloudposse/charts/tree/master/incubator
- 100s are maintained by community: https://github.com/helm/charts