Helm alternatives

Helm is battle tested and very common in the Kubernetes world, but it has its downsides and critics, especially when you develop your own charts. A lot of the criticism was about Helm 2 and its server-side component, Tiller. However, Helm 3 is not a panacea either. On a large scale, when you develop your own charts and complex templates with lots of conditional logic and massive values files, it can become very challenging to manage.

If you feel the pain, you may want to investigate some alternatives. Note that most of these projects focus on the deployment aspect. Helm’s dependency management is still a strength. Let’s look at some interesting projects that you may want to consider.

Kustomize

Kustomize is an alternative to YAML templating by using the concept of overlays on top of raw YAML files. It was added to kubectl in Kubernetes 1.14.

See https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize.

Cue

Cue is a very interesting project...