The biggest project on GitHub right now, The best container orchestrator (personal opinion), These are some of the many adjectives used to describe kubernetes.Kubernetes is a container orchestrator which is built, keeping a tool called Borgmon as a reference.Google was running on container even before docker came into the world and borgmon was the software that was used inside Google to orchestrate these containers.Some smart people at Google started building kubernetes with the lessons they learned using borgmon.Google then donated kubernetes to CNCF and it became the first project to be incubated in CNCF.The project, as well as the community, grew substantially and It is where is at now.
For someone new to kubernetes, It’s a little bit overwhelming.There are tons of details to digest.Here’s where helm comes into the picture.Helm brings the familiar apt-get, yum etc to kubernetes.It makes installing your applications into a kubernetes cluster easier and also provides you with standard components ready to install.There is very high chance for a beginner not following the best practices for k8s.In such a situation you can make a safe bet with helm because there are charts (more on this soon) which are kubernetes “packages”, carefully curated by experts.
Helm has charts which are analogous to packages in apt-get.Say you wanna install nginx,
In Ubuntu, you can do it by apt-get install nginx
The same can be achieved in kubernetes using helm helm install stable/nginx
This was a very gentle introduction to helm.The helm docs are very much detailed and helm brings a lot of features and power with it.You can read and learn more about it at the official helm website.