Kubernetes gained popularity as it simplifies the scalability and management of containerized applications. It enables you to deploy and manage nodes, pods, containers, services, and configuration maps across the entire application lifecycle. It was difficult to achieve such flexibility and control with scripts. But thanks to Kubernetes’ declarative approach to infrastructure, you can define precise changes at any scale. Kubernetes also empowers you to integrate multiple tools to facilitate automated scheduling, deployment, monitoring for the containers. One such tool is Helm, a CNCF-adopted automation framework that has gained popularity not just in Kubernetes circles, but in the GitOps ecosystem as well. In this post, we look at how Helm helps automate the deployment of cloud-native applications on Kubernetes the GitOps way.

What Is Helm?

Although described as a package manager, Helm is a powerful tool to automate installation, deployment, upgrade, and management of Kubernetes applications. Managing Kubernetes manifests is a task that grows in complexity as systems scale. A single deployment needs multiple YAML files with duplicated and hardcoded values. This required a better way to manage Kubernetes YAML files through a simple packaging format, which led to Helm Charts. However, Helm’s scope goes beyond templating.