helm VS helmfile

Helm Official Docs:

Helm installed: brew install helm or from https://helm.sh

Docker Compose is great for demos: docker compose up, and you're good to go, but I know no organization that uses it in production. Deploying workloads to Kubernetes is much more involved than that. I've used Kubernetes for demos in the past; typing kubectl apply -f is dull fast. In addition to GitOps, which isn't feasible for demos, the two main competitors are Helm and Kustomize. I chose the former for its ability to add dependencies.

Helm Charts – An open-source solution for software deployment on top of Kubernetes

Clicks, copies, and pasting. That's an approach to deploying your applications in Kubernetes. Anyone who's worked with Kubernetes for more than 5 minutes knows that this is not a recipe for repeatability and confidence in your setup. Good news is, you've got options when tackling this problem. The option I'm going to present below is using Helm.

💚Helm 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 - Helm is a tool for managing Charts. Charts are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources.

Helm

Helm - Kubernetes Package Manager

Looks like we're good to go (assuming you already have helm installed, if not install it first)! Let's install the IKO. We are going to need to tell helm where the folder with all our goodies is (that's the iris-operator folder you see above). If we were to be sitting at the chart directory you can use the command

If you have been looking for a tool to deploy your applications into a Kubernetes cluster, you have definitely stumbled upon Helm. Its the most common Kubernetes configuration management tool out there.

Helmfile fixed that problem for good.

💚Helmfile 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 - Helmfile is a declarative spec for deploying helm charts.

We can deploy our tool stack with helmfile. First check the architecture, for ex. with a command like uname -m and then install helmfile with the correct package. In my case the architecture was x86_64 and hence, I am installing the linux_amd64 package.

The answer lies in a simple yet powerful sub-command – helm template (or helmfile template if you use Helmfile). This command allows you to locally render helm charts along with your desired values, generating the final deployment manifest files.

sudo wget https://github.com/helmfile/helmfile/releases/download/v0.159.0/helmfile_0.159.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz sudo tar -xxf helmfile_0.159.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz sudo rm helmfile_0.159.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz sudo mv helmfile /usr/local/bin/

Installation: https://github.com/helmfile/helmfile/releases

What are the benefits over using helmfile? https://helmfile.readthedocs.io/

Helm charts and Helmfile

And now I can just run dudo -l "https://github.com/helmfile/helmfile/releases/download/v{{ version }}/helmfile_{{ version }}_{{ os }}_{{ arch }}.tar.gz" -i /tmp/helmfile.tar.gz -p $HELMFILE_VERSION

I might be misunderstanding your question but we use https://github.com/helmfile/helmfile along with Argo, so essentially between eks and those I could rebuild our entire cluster in minutes.