Matt Butcher - Learning Helm: Managing Apps on Kubernetes

by Matt Butcher , Matt Farina , and Josh Dolitsky

Copyright 2021 Matt Butcher, Innovating Tomorrow, and Blood Orange. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-08365-8

[LSI]

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes, the popular open source container management platform.

Package managers make platforms more accessible to those who use them. In order to use a platform like Kubernetes, you need to run software on it, and much of that software will be off-the-shelf or shared. Package managers like Helm enable you to install and start using the software quickly without needing to figure out how to make it run or run well on the platform, because it has already been packaged up in an easy-to-use manner.

If you have software you want to share with others, package managers make it easy to do. Platforms are more useful when there is a wide variety of software to run on them; open source projects and companies both like to make their software easy to install on the platforms it runs on, and Helm makes this possible for Kubernetes.

Package managers arent just for sharing and consuming others software, however. They are often an integral part of other systems, such as DevOps tooling, and they are used as a building block.

Virtually every modern platform has a package manager. Operating systems, programming languages, and cloud platforms all have package managers of some form.

In this book you will learn about Helm, which provides modern package management for Kubernetes, and the packages, called charts, that you can use with it. You will learn how to use Helm, how to create packages, and how to share those packages with other platforms.