There are now many charts (packages) for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager. These charts are provided by companies, like Bitnami (part of VMware), open source projects, and individuals. These days, the charts are hosted in a distributed manner where these different people and groups can host them on their own. To aide in discovering these distributed charts, there are now multiple services you can use.

This post is going to look at four of them in reverse chronological order from the time of their creation.

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Using kubectl exec to execute commands in a container is a powerful feature for Kubernetes. It’s especially useful for debugging applications. But, it can also be a security risk and some policies require you to disable this feature. So, how can you do it?

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On June 10th 2020, Mike Vizard writing for the Container Journal wrote:

As IT organizations look to operationalize what may soon become fleets of Kubernetes clusters, the amount of time required to deploy applications on those clusters will need to be greatly reduced. Helm provides a means of accomplishing that goal using an open source tool that is not going to fade away anytime soon because of a lack of community support. That’s especially significant as IT teams start to appreciate not just the challenges associated with provisioning and maintaining Kubernetes clusters but also all the software that eventually gets deployed on them.

In all openness, this was after Mike interviewed me for the article because the CNCF launched a Helm journey report.

This paragraph, from the article, has a lot packed into it. I wanted to take a moment to unpack it and provide some context.

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Artifact versions regularly change and new releases come out. Cloud native software changes and it can be difficult to stay on top of the changes. Notifications and webhooks when updates come out are rarely available for consumers. The Artifact Hub is different. It now provides notifications and webhooks, that you can use for programming, when new releases of packages come out.

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Helm v3 uses Kubernetes Secrets as the default method to store release information in a cluster. This bucks some newer trends, but if you look at the needs and features it turns out that Secrets are a good fit. In this post you’ll learn why Helm uses Secrets by default and how you can do something similar if Secrets fit well for you.

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