Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes - 2nd Edition

Key Takeaways

With the knowledge gained in this chapter, you should now be comfortable installing, upgrading, and managing Helm charts in your Kubernetes cluster. The goal wasn't to cover every single Helm concept but rather to provide you with an in-depth introduction to the most commonly used features and commands. In the next chapters, we will see how ArgoCD can help us manage Helm charts in a GitOps way.

Before moving on, here are the key takeaways:

• Helm is not just a package manager; it's also a powerful templating engine that allows you to create dynamic Kubernetes manifests.
• Helm plugins can extend the functionality of Helm by providing additional capabilities.
• Charts define applications. A chart is a structured set of files and templates that render Kubernetes manifests from configuration values.
• Releases are tracked installations of charts. Each install or upgrade creates a versioned release that Helm can inspect, upgrade, roll back, or uninstall.
• helm install, helm upgrade, and helm upgrade --install are the core workflow for managing application lifecycles.