Helm – the package manager for K8s

A package manager for Kubernetes—that might sound confusing at first. We are building images with system packages and pushing those to the image registry with Docker or another tool. Why do we need a package manager?

Note

This section is not a prerequisite for passing the KCNA exam; however, it is strongly recommended reading as it might help you to avoid mistakes when using Kubernetes in real-world, practical setups.

Imagine the following scenario—you are operating a few Kubernetes clusters for a small enterprise. Those Kubernetes clusters are similar in size and configuration and run exactly the same applications, but for different environments such as development, testing, and production. The dev team was pushing for microservices architecture, and now there are about 50 microservices that run on Kubernetes working together as a part of bigger applications.

The naive way to manage the Kubernetes specifications for...