Understanding Helm
Kubernetes provides many ways to organize and orchestrate your containers at runtime, but it lacks a higher-level organization of grouping sets of images together. This is where Helm comes in. In this section, we’ll go over the motivation for Helm, its architecture, and its components. We will discuss Helm 3. You might still find Helm 2 in the wild, but its end of life was at the end of 2020.
As you might recall, Kubernetes means helmsman or navigator in Greek. The Helm project took the nautical theme very seriously, as the project’s name implies. The main Helm concept is the chart. Just as nautical charts describe in detail an area in the sea or a coastal region, a Helm chart describes in detail all the parts of an application.
Helm is designed to perform the following:
- Build charts from the ground up
- Bundle charts into archive files (
.tgz) - Interact with repositories containing charts
- Deploy and remove charts in...
