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Happy Birthday Helm, you are five years old!

Helm was born on October 15th, 2015.

Today October 15th, 2020 it marks its five years anniversary.

Over the years the Helm community has grown up a lot, with contributors and users from many different companies and with a big adoption as well.

There are 35k+ charts versions available in public Helm repositories.

It has for sure become DE FACTO the Kubernetes Package Manager, of course there is no such tool which suits all, as this is why we see tools like Kustomize and others there as well.

What a journey!

Let's recap what happened in this five years' time.

2015

  • Helm v1 (classic) was born in an internal Hackathon at Deis.

2016

  • Helm v2 release, bring Tiller as a server component, which brought lots of discussions about

2018

  • First Helm summit
  • Helm becomes an incubator project in CNCF
  • Helm Hub release, to make easier to find Helm charts from many different Helm repositories

2019

  • Second Helm summit
  • Helm v3 release (yes, it took three years), removes Tiller as a server component.
  • Helm plugin helm-2to3 release to make easier to migrate from Helm v2 to v3

2020

  • Helm graduated as CNCF project

2020 is a busy time in Helm space

  • CNCF project Artifact Hub release, which is more advanced than Helm Hub, has a nice and informative UI, but still it cannot be used as one central Helm repository.

  • ChartCenter released by JFrog a free, central repository of public Helm charts for the Kubernetes community. ChartCenter is similar to the services Artifact Hub offers, but it is much more than just a catalog: it’s a repository of Helm charts that holds immutable versions. So Helm CLI can pull all the public Helm charts from a single, central place with certainty and be a single source of truth.

ChartCenter also serves stable and incubator Helm repositories:

$ helm repo add center https://repo.chartcenter.io
$ helm repo update
$ helm search repo center/stable/nginx-ingress

  • Helm Hub was shutdown and replaced by Artifact Hub

  • Stable and incubator charts Helm and git repos are getting to be deprecated in November.

  • Helm v2 has been deprecated for a year now, and is about to go unmaintained on November 13, 2020. Now it is really THE TIME to migrate to Helm v3.

Happy Birthday Helm.

Let Helm guide you through the Kubernetes ocean of containers :)

If somebody is interested in how Helm was born please read my blog post written four years ago.

Rimantas Mocevicius

Rimantas Mocevicius