Why Helm

Hub › Kubernetes › Advanced › Why Helm

Goal

Understand what Helm solves compared to raw kubectl apply -f, and install Helm locally.

Prerequisites

• Intermediate tier completed
• kubectl configured against a kind cluster

The raw-YAML problem

The beginner and intermediate tiers used kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml. This works for one or two files, but in production you have:

• Environment duplication — dev, staging, prod with slightly different values
• No versioning — no built-in way to roll back to a previous release
• Templating — every environment needs its own copy of the same YAML
• Dependency management — app A needs Redis, app B needs Postgres, no way to declare it

Helm solves all four: it packages Kubernetes manifests as a chart with templated values, supports rollbacks, and can depend on other charts.

Install Helm

# macOS
brew install helm

# Or from the script:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

# Verify
helm version --short
# v3.17+

Chart structure

mychart/
  Chart.yaml          # metadata (name, version, dependencies)
  values.yaml         # default configuration values
  templates/          # Go-template YAML files
    deployment.yaml
    service.yaml
    _helpers.tpl      # reusable template snippets

Helm processes templates/ with values.yaml and produces the final Kubernetes manifests.

Checkpoint

helm version --short
# v3.17.x
helm create demo  # scaffold a chart
ls demo/
# Chart.yaml  charts/  templates/  values.yaml
rm -rf demo  # clean up — we'll build our own next

Next: Package with Helm — create a chart for the intermediate web app.