cloudposse/docs

What are people using helm for?

osterman opened this issue · 1 comments

osterman commented

question

  • What are people using helm for? I understand it as a concept of charts, etc...

answer

TL;DR: deployments into kubernetes

helm is like npm for kubernetes or like a module for terraform. You can represent all the resources required for an application as a cohesive unit that is parameterized and templatized so you can install it multiple times. it also comes with a dependency management system, so you can require other charts. It helps to think of kubernetes like a cluster-aware operating system. So instead of installing an application on just one node, you’re installing an application across multiple nodes. For a traditional OS, we’ve always relied on package managers. helm solves the equivalent problem but for kubernetes.

A chart is just a package. Under the hood, it’s a gzipped tarball that contains some metadata about the application (name, version, dependencies) and then some go templates of kubernetes resources.

osterman commented

Here are some examples of charts: