Supercharging Your DevOps Journey With Helm!

The world of DevOps has given so many opportunities for software organizations. Software development best practices have given rise to many platforms and tools to deploy software quickly and easily. Kubernetes and Helm can do so much together in helping developers deploy software with less effort. Kubernetes is the most popular open-source platform for running container-based apps in the enterprise. In fact, organizations aim at running all their production deployments on Kubernetes.

These are exciting times for those in the Kubernetes community because we’re seeing more and more users leverage its extended capabilities for even deeper operational insight and control. One such capability is the use of Helm to package and deploy individual Kubernetes applications.

So, what is Helm?

Image credits: IBM Developer

Helm is a popular open-source tool for managing Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies the process of installing, updating, and removing applications on your cluster by packaging them as "charts." These charts are then installed on your cluster with one command.

Helm relies on the concept of charts. A chart is an archive of all the resource definitions that are needed to deploy an application to Kubernetes, including the configuration files and scripts needed for deployment. To get started with Helm, you need to create a chart for your application or find one online that suits your needs. Today, we will see a simple tutorial on how to create a simple Helm chart.

You can quickly install software onto your Kubernetes cluster, and the public Helm charts are readily available in the?ArtifactHub .

With Kubernetes becoming the de-facto container orchestration platform for companies navigating through the cloud-native journey, Helm makes it easy for applications to be installed and upgraded in a repeatable fashion as discussed above. ‘Kubernetes + Helm’ combo is a way to get started on the cloud-native path.

Helm Case Studies

Buffer, a social media management platform, had a monolithic architecture. In 2016, they decided to move to service-oriented architecture. They started using Docker for their development environments, and they needed a solution that can work well with containers. After assessing several tools in the market like Mesosphere and Amazon ECS, the Buffer crew settled on Kubernetes. They liked Kubernetes because of the problems that it solves with containers, by its relative maturity, large community, and cloud-provider-agnosticism.

The Buffer engineering team began the migration process by rebuilding a piece of the monolith's functionality into its own, self-contained service. The project intended to set a remarkable example for other microservices at Buffer moving forward. After the success of this project, they looked towards breaking out different pieces of the monolith & making them separate microservices units.

Two years later, Buffer is running three k8s clusters with over 140 services. They faced several?challenges with Kubernetes deployments ?along the way, but then they started solving them moving onto Helm package manager that allows developers to define Charts to describe k8s configuration making deployments easy.?

[Source credits for above Buffer's story:?Stackshare ]

One more good example is?Neptune, a cloud-native data science lab, had a challenge handling infrastructure as most of the folks were data scientists or mathematicians, they wanted to make these folks work painlessly.

After going through several alternatives, the team decided to use Kubernetes as a layer of abstraction that separates data scientists from the low-level infrastructure problems. Kubernetes started smoothly handling the fluctuating amount of resources. Along with Kubernetes, the team started embracing Helm templates to reduce the time needed to run new machines and start an experiment.?

[Source credits for above Neptune's story:?CodiLime ]

Functions of Helm:

• Install software
• Automatically install software dependencies
• Upgrade software
• Configure software deployment
• Fetch packages from repositories

Helm makes it easy to start using Kubernetes with real applications.?Kubernetes + Helm duo has become the basic toolset for any DevOps specialist. Helm provides several CI/CD pipeline integration hooks, we can configure actions to occur; for example, before installation begins, or after an upgrade has finished. You can even set health checks for Helm to run and verify a deployment has completed successfully.

Helm helps to optimize Kubernetes deployments with ease. Helm has become a popular tool in the Kubernetes ecosystem, gives all developers a way of building packages (known as charts) of related Kubernetes objects that can be deployed in a cohesive way to a cluster. It also enables parameterizing these packages, so they can be reused in different contexts and deployed to the different environments that the services they provide might be needed in.

Would you like to play with Helm? It is easy.

I have this simple tutorial you can try right away and get your hands on Helm to see how it works and its advantages. In the below tutorial, you will learn how to create a helm chart and deploy it with the help of?Harness , a modern continuous delivery platform.

Thanks!