Introduction to Helm

Difficulty: Intermediate
Duration: 3 minutes and 19 seconds
Students: 5,404
Rating: 4.3/5

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, used to simplify and enhance the deployment experience for deploying resources into a Kubernetes cluster. 

This training lesson explores Helm 3, which is the latest version of Helm building upon the successes of Helm 2. During this lesson, you'll learn the fundamentals of working with Helm3, its features, and the key differences between Helm 3 and Helm 2.

Several hands-on demonstrations are provided within this lesson, which will allow you to observe how to install and set up Helm, and also how to use Helm to perform various Chart cluster management related tasks. You'll also see how to create and host your very own Helm Chart. All of the coding assets which are used and demonstrated can be found within the CloudAcademy GitHub repositories for this lesson — they can be found in the links under the Resources section below. You’re encouraged to clone these repositories and perform the same helm commands against your own Kubernetes cluster.

If you have any feedback about this lesson, please contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.

Learning Objectives

By completing this lesson, you will learn:

  • What Helm is and how to install it
  • Helm charts, templates, releases, revisions, and repositories
  • How to deploy, upgrade and rollback Helm charts
  • How to create and host your own Helm charts

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this lesson includes:

  • Anyone interested in learning about Helm and its fundamentals
  • Software Engineers interested in learning how to configure and deploy Helm charts into a Kubernetes cluster
  • DevOps and SRE practitioners interested in understanding how to install, manage and maintain Helm-deployed infrastructure

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this lesson, you should have:

  • A basic understanding of Kubernetes
  • Experience with deploying Kubernetes resources such as pods, deployments, services, etc.
  • A basic understanding of software development and the software development lifecycle

If you’re completely new to Kubernetes, please consider taking our dedicated Introduction to Kubernetes course.

Resources

https://github.com/cloudacademy/helm-demo

https://github.com/cloudacademy/helm-repo

Covered Topics