The Art of Helm: Package Management for Kubernetes

Imagine you manage a fleet of Linux machines and your org needs NGINX, Java, Python, and many more on the list to be managed on every one of the systems in the organization.
If you had no package manager, here’s what each install would look like:

1. Find the right download page
2. Download the archive
3. Unzip it
4. Move it to the right path
5. Configure it and make it run

Now repeat that for every package, on every machine, and write a separate shell script for each one. Then keep every script up to date as versions change. That’s a huge maintenance burden for any DevOps team.

Linux solved this decades ago with apt. You run apt install nginx and it knows where to look, what to download and how to install it. You can also upgrade to a specific version or remove the package cleanly.

Kubernetes has the same problem, and Helm is the solution.

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes.

Without it, installing something like Prometheus or Grafana means writing and maintaining a pile of manifests: Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, ServiceAccounts and more. With Helm, you point at a repository, pick an application and install it with one command.

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Just like apt, Helm lets you:

• Install third-party applications
• Upgrade or pin a specific version
• Uninstall cleanly
• Bundle and share your own applications, so people outside your organization can install them too

Steps to Install Helm:

1. Install the Helm using the official document https://helm.sh/docs/
2. once installed look for helm — version
3. Spin up your K8s Cluster

I added Bitnami, one of the most popular maintainers of Helm charts:
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm repo update
helm search repo bitnami

4. Install NGINX

helm search repo nginx
helm install my-nginx bitnami/nginx

5. verify

helm list
kubectl get pods

6. Uninstall

helm uninstall my-nginx

Installing other people’s charts is only half the story. Helm also lets you bundle your own applications as charts.

Imagine a banking application with two microservices: payments and deposits. Helm can scaffold a chart for each:

helm create payments

This creates a folder structure. Before Helm, we would have had to write and maintain separate manifests for every piece of Prometheus and Grafana: the Deployments, Services, ServiceAccounts, ConfigMaps, and more, and keep all of them up to date by hand. With Helm, one chart bundles all of that. It’s versioned, so upgrades and rollbacks are predictable, and it’s repeatable, so the same chart can go to dev and prod with different values files. The maintenance doesn’t disappear, but it shrinks from many scripts to one command and one values file.

If you’ve ever been grateful for apt install, you’ll love Helm.