chartmuseum VS helm

We may switch over to Chartmusuem, and something like Charts-Syncer to try to help with this, or maybe abandon the whole idea of mirroring external repositories and just keep our repository hosting internal projects. What are your thoughts on this?

Also trying to find a small self-hosted container registry (not some beast like goharbor.io) and possibly a Helm chart repository (looking into chartmuseum.com). Anyone got some recommendations?

You can use either something like https://chartmuseum.com/ or any docker registry if it has OCI support.

ChartMuseum is indeed open source and is on GitHub.

This is also basically an s3 proxy, but it specifically implements the Terraform Registry API so that things like version constraints are handled correctly. If you use Helm at all, an analogous project for charts would be https://github.com/helm/chartmuseum

I raised a PR (WIP) https://github.com/helm/chartmuseum/pull/464 but wondering if others would think this is useful or if I just have a niche usecase.

Another benefit of Helm is in it's package management. If your application requires another team's application up and running, they can publish their Helm chart to a remote repository like a ChartMuseum. You can then install their application into your Kubernetes by naming that remote chart combined with a local values file. E.g., helm install other-teams-app https://charts.mycompany.com/other-teams-app-1.2.3.tgz -f values-other-teams-app.yaml. This is convenient because it means you don't have to checkout their project and dig through it for their helm charts to get up and running - all you need to supply is your own values file.

Applying Kubernetes manifests individually is problematic because files can get overlooked. Packaging your applications as Helm charts lets you version your manifests and easily repeat deployments into different environments. Helm tracks the state of each deployment as a "release" in your cluster.

helm

Explanation here: https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/12681#issuecomment-19593...

Looks like it's a bug in Helm, but actually isn't Helm's fault, the issue was introduced by Fedora Linux.

Helm (Get from here https://helm.sh/)

It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.

Kubernetes orchestrates deployments and manages resources through yaml configuration files. While Kubernetes supports a wide array of resources and configurations, our aim in this tutorial is to maintain simplicity. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, we will use yaml configurations with hardcoded values. This method simplifies the learning process but isn’t ideal for production environments due to the need for manual updates with each new deployment. Although there are methods to streamline and automate this process, such as using Helm charts or bash scripts, we’ll not delve into those techniques to keep the tutorial manageable and avoid fatigue — you might be quite tired by that point!

Helm is a package manager that automates Kubernetes applications' creation, packaging, configuration, and deployment by combining your configuration files into a single reusable package. This eliminates the requirement to create the mentioned Kubernetes resources by ourselves since they have been implemented within the Helm chart. All we need to do is configure it as needed to match our requirements. From the public Helm chart repository, we can get the charts for common software packages like Consul, Jenkins SonarQube, etc. We can also create our own Helm charts for our custom applications so that we don’t need to repeat ourselves and simplify deployments.

We can search for charts https://helm.sh/ . Charts can be pulled(downloaded) and optionally unpacked(untar).

Generally I felt as if I was diving in the deepest of waters without the correct equipement and that was horrifying. Unfortunately to me, I had to dive even deeper before getting equiped with tools like ArgoCD, and k8slens. I had to start working with... HELM.

Within the architecture of Cyclops, a central component is the Helm engine. Helm is very popular within the Kubernetes community; chances are you have already run into it. The popularity of Helm plays to Cyclops's strength because of its straightforward integration.