Installing complex Kubernetes applications using Helm

In the previous section, you used static YAML files to deploy an application. When deploying more complicated applications, across multiple environments (such as dev/test/prod), it can become cumbersome to manually edit YAML files for each environment. This is where the Helm tool comes in.

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. Helm helps you deploy, update, and manage Kubernetes applications at scale. For this, you write something called Helm Charts.

You can think of Helm Charts as parameterized Kubernetes YAML files. If you think about the Kubernetes YAML files we wrote in the previous section, those files were static. You would need to go into the files and edit them to make changes.

Helm Charts allow you to write YAML files with certain parameters in them, which you can dynamically set. This setting of the parameters can be done through a values file or as a command-line variable when you deploy the chart.

Finally...