1.4K
876
+ 1
18

What is Helm?

Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes.
Helm is a tool in the Helm Charts category of a tech stack.
Helm is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Helm's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Helm?

Companies
465 companies reportedly use Helm in their tech stacks, including Delivery Hero, CircleCI, and trivago.

Developers
782 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Helm.

Helm Integrations

Docker, Kubernetes, Loki, Gitea, and Harbor are some of the popular tools that integrate with Helm. Here's a list of all 23 tools that integrate with Helm.
Pros of Helm
8
Infrastructure as code
6
Open source
2
Easy setup
1
Support
1
Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
Decisions about Helm

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Helm in their tech stack.

Emanuel Evans
Senior Architect at Rainforest QA · | 20 upvotes · 1.5M views

We recently moved our main applications from Heroku to Kubernetes . The 3 main driving factors behind the switch were scalability (database size limits), security (the inability to set up PostgreSQL instances in private networks), and costs (GCP is cheaper for raw computing resources).

We prefer using managed services, so we are using Google Kubernetes Engine with Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for our PostgreSQL databases and Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis . For our CI/CD pipeline, we are using CircleCI and Google Cloud Build to deploy applications managed with Helm . The new infrastructure is managed with Terraform .

Read the blog post to go more in depth.

See more
Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 7 upvotes · 496.9K views

We began our hosting journey, as many do, on Heroku because they make it easy to deploy your application and automate some of the routine tasks associated with deployments, etc. However, as our team grew and our product matured, our needs have outgrown Heroku. I will dive into the history and reasons for this in a future blog post.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Amazon EKS. Although Google Kubernetes Engine has a slightly more mature Kubernetes offering and is more user-friendly; we decided to go with EKS because we already using other AWS services (including a previous migration from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS). We are still in the process of moving our main website workloads to EKS, however we have successfully migrate all our staging and testing PR apps to run in a staging cluster. We developed a Slack chatops application (also running in the cluster) which automates all the common tasks of spinning up and managing a production-like cluster for a pull request. This allows our engineering team to iterate quickly and safely test code in a full production environment. Helm plays a central role when deploying our staging apps into the cluster. We use CircleCI to build docker containers for each PR push, which are then published to Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECR). An upgrade-operator process watches the ECR repository for new containers and then uses Helm to rollout updates to the staging environments. All this happens automatically and makes it really easy for developers to get code onto servers quickly. The immutable and isolated nature of our staging environments means that we can do anything we want in that environment and quickly re-create or restore the environment to start over.

The next step in our journey is to migrate our production workloads to an EKS cluster and build out the CD workflows to get our containers promoted to that cluster after our QA testing is complete in our staging environments.

See more

Blog Posts

GitHubGitDocker+34
29
42409

Helm Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Helm?
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Rancher
Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
See all alternatives

Helm's Followers
877 developers follow Helm to keep up with related blogs and decisions.