CNCF announces Helm 3, a Kubernetes package manager and tool to manage charts and libraries

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, yesterday announced the stable release of Helm 3. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes and a tool for managing charts of pre-configured Kubernetes resources.

“Helm is one of our fastest-growing projects in contributors and users contributing back to the project,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “Helm is a powerful tool for all Kubernetes users to streamline deployments, and we’re impressed by the progress the community has made with this release in growing their community.”

As per the team the internal implementation of Helm 3 has changed considerably from Helm 2. The most important change is the removal of Tiller, a service that communicates with the Kubernetes API to manage Helm packages. Then there are improvements to chart repositories, release management, security, and library charts.

Helm uses a packaging format called charts, which are collections of files describing a related set of Kubernetes resources. These charts can then be packaged into versioned archives to be deployed. Helm 2 defined a workflow for creating, installing, and managing these charts. Helm 3 builds upon that workflow, changing the underlying infrastructure to reflect the needs of the community as they change and evolve.

In this release, the Helm maintainers incorporated feedback and requests from the community to better address the needs of Kubernetes users and the broad cloud native ecosystem.

Helm 3 is ready for public deployment

Last week, third party security firm Cure53 completed their open source security audit of Helm 3, mentioning Helm’s mature focus on security, and concluded that Helm 3 is “recommended for public deployment.”

According to the report, “in light of the findings stemming from this CNCF-funded project, Cure53 can only state that the Helm projects the impression of being highly mature. This verdict is driven by a number of different factors… and essentially means that Helm can be recommended for public deployment, particularly when properly configured and secured in accordance to recommendations specified by the development team.”

“When we built Helm, we set out to create a tool to serve as an ‘on-ramp’ to Kubernetes. With Helm 3, we have really accomplished that,” said Matt Fisher, the Helm 3 release manager. “Our goal has always been to make it easier for the Kubernetes user to create, share, and run production-grade workloads. The core maintainers are really excited to hit this major milestone, and we look forward to hearing how the community is using Helm 3.”

Helm 3 is a joint community effort, with core maintainers from organizations including Microsoft, Samsung SDS, IBM, and Blood Orange. As per the team the next phase of Helm’s development will see new features targeted toward stability and enhancements to existing features. Features on the roadmap include enhanced functionality for helm test, improvements to Helm’s OCI integration, and enhanced functionality for the Go client libraries.

To know more about this news, read the official announcement from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform 3.0 releases with advanced configuration and vulnerability management capabilities

Microsoft launches Open Application Model (OAM) and Dapr to ease developments in Kubernetes and microservices

An unpatched security issue in the Kubernetes API is vulnerable to a “billion laughs” attack

Kubernetes 1.16 releases with Endpoint Slices, general availability of Custom Resources, and other enhancements

StackRox App integrates into the Sumo Logic Dashboard for improved Kubernetes security