Understanding Helm
The simplest way to distribute your Kubernetes application to others so that they can deploy it on their cluster is by sharing the Kubernetes objects' YAML manifest files, for example using a public source repository such as https://github.com/. This approach is often used as a basic showcase of how you can run a given application as a container on Kubernetes. However, sharing raw YAML manifests has quite a few disadvantages:
- All values in YAML templates are hardcoded. This means that if you want to change the number of replicas of a Service object or a value stored in the ConfigMap object, you need to go through the manifest files, find the values you want to configure, and then edit them. Similarly, if you want to deploy the manifests to a different namespace in the cluster than the creators intended, you need to edit all YAML files. On top of that, you do not really know which values in the YAML templates are intended to be configurable by the creator...
