Implementing templates on Kubernetes with Helm and Kustomize

Now that we know our options, we can implement each of them with an example application. This will allow us to understand the specifics of how each tool handles variables and the process of templating. Let's start with Helm.

Using Helm with Kubernetes

As mentioned previously, Helm is an open source project that makes it easy to template and deploy applications on Kubernetes. For the purposes of this book, we will be focused on the newest version (as of the time of writing), Helm V3. A previous version, Helm V2, had more moving parts, including a controller, called Tiller, that would run on the cluster. Helm V3 is simplified and only contains the Helm CLI tool. It does, however, use custom resource definitions on the cluster to track releases, as we will see shortly.

Let's start by installing Helm.

Installing Helm

If you want to use a specific version of Helm, you can install it by following the specific...