Learning Helm: Managing Apps on Kubernetes

Get up to speed with Helm, the preeminent package manager for the Kubernetes container orchestration system. This practical guide shows you how to efficiently create, install, and manage the applications running inside your containers. Helm maintainers Matt Butcher, Matt Farina, and Josh Dolitsky explain how this package manager fits into the Kubernetes ecosystem and provide an inside look at Helm’s design and best practices.

More than 70% of the organizations that work with Kubernetes use Helm today. While the Helm community provides thousands of packages, or charts, to help you get started, this book walks developers and DevOps engineers through the process of creating custom charts to package applications. If you have a working understanding of Kubernetes, you’re ready to go.

• Explore primary features including frequently used Helm commands
• Learn how to build and deploy Helm charts from scratch
• Use Helm to manage complexity and achieve repeatable deployments
• Package an application and its dependencies for easy installation
• Manage the entire lifecycle of applications on Kubernetes
• Explore ways to extend Helm to add features and functionality
• Learn features for testing, handling dependencies, and providing security

Matt Butcher is a co-founder/creator of the Helm project. He leads a team of open source engineers at Microsoft Azure. Matt is also the co-creator of the Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes (with Karen Chu) and has authored eight other books (two with Matt Farina). He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy. When not coding, he enjoys drinking great coffee or hiking in the Colorado Rockies.

Matt Farina is a maintainer on the Helm project and has been contributing to open source projects for more than 15 years. He co-founded and co-chairs Kubernetes Apps Special Interest Group (SIG) which focuses on running workloads on Kubernetes. Matt works on the Cloud Native Computing Team at Samsung SDS where he focuses on contributing to open source and applying open source software to new development. He has previously authored two books alongside Matt Butcher. Creative problem solving and helping people are two driving forces for Matt’s work with software.

Josh Dolitsky is a maintainer of the Helm project and founder of the ChartMuseum project. He is the owner and lead engineer of Blood Orange, a software consulting firm specialized in helping with DevOps, CI/CD, and Kubernetes.