Can someone explain me some use cases of helm?

Question

I’m currently using kubernetes and I came across of helm. Let’s say I don’t like the idea of “infecting” my kubernetes cluster with a process that is not related to my applications but I would gladly accept it if it could be beneficial.

So I made some researches but I still can’t find anything I can’t easily do by using my yaml descriptor and kubectl so for now I can’t find an use except,maybe, for the environizing.

For example (taking it from guides I read:

1. you can easily install application, eg. helm install nginx —> I add an nginx image to my deployment descriptor, done
2. repositories -> I have docker ones (where I pull my images from)
3. you can easily helm rollback in case of release failure-> I just change the image version to the previous one in my kubernetes descriptor, easy

What bothers me is that, at level of commands, I do pretty much the same effort (helm update->kubectl apply). In exchange for that I have a lot of boilerplate because of keeping the directory structure helm wants and I feel like missing the control I have with plain deployment descriptors ...what am I missing?

Answer 1

Here's three suggestions of ways Helm can be useful:

1. Your continuous deployment system somewhat routinely produces new builds and wants to send them to the Kubernetes cluster. You can use templating to specify the image name and tag in a deployment, and so helm upgrade ... --set tag=201907211931 to request a specific tag.

2. You might have various service-specific controls like the log level or external database hostnames. The Helm values mechanism gives a uniform way to specify them, without having to know the details of the Kubernetes YAML files.

3. There is a repository of pre-packaged application charts, so if you want replicated PostgreSQL with in-cluster persistent storage, that's already built for you and you can just depend on it, rather than figuring out the right combination of StatefulSets and PersistentVolumeClaims yourself.

You can combine these in interesting (and potentially complex) ways: use an in-cluster database for developer testing but use a cloud-hosted and backed-up database for production, for example, and compute the database host name based on what combination of settings are provided.

There are, of course, alternative ways to do all of these things. Kustomize in particular can change the image value fairly straightforwardly, and is notable for having been included in the kubectl tool since Kubernetes 1.14 (see also Declarative Management of Kubernetes Objects Using Kustomize in the Kubernetes documentation). The "operator" pattern gives an alternate path to install software in your cluster, but even more so than Helm you're trusting an arbitrary program with API access.

Answer 2

It is totally understandable your question. For small and simple deploys the benefits is not actually that great. But when the deploy of something is very complex Helm helps a lot.

Think that you have a couple squads that develop microservice for some company. If you can make a Chart that works for most of them, the deploy of each microservices would differ only by the image and the resources required. This way you get an standardized deployment and easier to all developers.

Another use case is deploying applications which requires a lot of moving parts. For example, if you want to deploy a Grafana server on Kubernetes you're probably going to need at least a Deployment and a Configmap, then you would need a service that matches this deployment. And if you want to expose it to the internet you need an ingress too.

One relatively simple application, would require 4 different YAMLs that you would to manually configure and make sure everything is correct instead you could do a simple helm install and reuse the configuration that someone has already made, sometimes even the company who created the Application.

There are a lot of other use cases, but these two are the ones that I would say are the most common.