Installing Your First App with Helm

Earlier in this book, we referred to Helm as the Kubernetes package manager and compared it to an operating system’s package manager. A package manager allows users to quickly and easily install applications of varying complexities and manage any dependencies that an application might have. Helm works similarly.

Users simply determine the application they want to deploy on Kubernetes and Helm does the rest of the work. A Helm chart – a packaging of Kubernetes resources – contains the logic and components required to install an application, allowing users to perform installations without needing to know the specific resources required. Users can also pass in parameters, called values, to a Helm chart to customize different aspects of the application. You will explore these features in this chapter by leveraging Helm as a package manager to deploy an instance of WordPress onto Kubernetes.

In this chapter, we will cover...