Helm

In this section, we are going to be taking a look at a tool that is very helpful in the Kubernetes ecosystem called Helm. Helm was created by Microsoft after it quickly became apparent that for any sizeable deployment of Kubernetes (for example, those involving 20 or more separate components, observability tools, services, and other objects), there are a lot of YAML manifests to keep track of. Couple that with the fact that many companies run multiple environments other than production, which you need to be able to keep in sync with each other, and you start to have an unwieldy problem on your hands.

Helm allows you to write Kubernetes manifest templates, to which you supply arguments that override any defaults, and then Helm creates the appropriate Kubernetes manifests for you. Thus, you can use Helm as a sort of package manager, where your entire application can be deployed using a Helm chart, and you can tweak a few small parameters before installing. Another way to use...