Summary

In this chapter, we began to peek into the world of Helm chart development by introducing the Helm chart and chart definition structure. A Helm chart consists of a chart definition (a Chart.yaml file) and template files used for generating Kubernetes resources. A chart definition is used to provide an identity around the chart, including metadata such as the chart name, version, description, and the application version that the chart deploys.

We also introduced an application called Guestbook, and we began writing a Helm chart that will be used to deploy this application. We ran the helm create command to scaffold a new Helm chart, and we updated the Chart.yaml file to better reflect the application that our chart will deploy. In the next chapter, we will return to the Chart.yaml file when we add a dependency for installing Redis, the backend service that our Guestbook frontend relies on.