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6 Tips for Creating Helm Charts in Kubernetes Applications
Build, maintain, and control Helm chart releases with fewer bugs and code issues
Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for running, automating, and managing the lifecycle of containerized applications. All resources managed by Kubernetes need to be defined in YAML or JSON format and processed by the Kubernetes API server.
Deploying applications with Kubernetes usually requires defining multiple resources (this highly depends on the application itself), such as the config maps, secret deployments, and service resources. Each of these resources needs to be created using the Kubernetes API server. Moreover, some resources need to be created in a specific order or need to wait for the success of the creation of other resources.
Kubernetes does not provide a packaging solution for the resources of the application. Luckily, a tool called Helm provides this feature out of the box.
You can consider Helm the package manager for Kubernetes applications. Helm packages the Kubernetes resources needed to deploy a given application into a unit called a chart. A Helm chart not only encapsulates the Kubernetes resources but can also explicitly define the order of the creation of these resources.
Here are the main benefits of using Helm for deploying Kubernetes services:
- It reduces the complexity of deploying microservices.
- It simplifies deployment scripts and files (all defined in YAML).
- It improves the productivity of the deployments and rollback.
- It provides a way of versioning the Kubernetes resources as a single unit.
To be able to deploy an application to a Kubernetes cluster with Helm, you need to create the Helm chart for the application and make sure that the chart is available to the Kubernetes cluster. A new chart can be bootstrapped using the Helm command line as shown below:
$> helm create service-xThe defined chart will be used to deploy your application. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all chart versions have a certain degree of quality (e.g. the chart is free of syntax errors).
