10 Helm Tutorials to Start your Kubernetes Journey

By Deep Datta April 30, 2021

5 min read

The growth of Kubernetes has been stellar and K8s applications have grown in importance and complexity. Today, even configuring a single application can require creating many interdependent K8s sources that each depend on writing a detailed YAML manifest file. With this in mind, Helm as a package manager for Kubernetes is a major way users can make their K8s configurations reusable.

Helm for Beginners

Helm is the go-to application package manager for Kubernetes that enables you to describe the structure of your application through Helm charts. Through the Helm command-line inteface you can rollback your deployment, monitor the state of your application, and track the history of each deployment. Helm provides a giant change in the way that server-side applications are defined, stored and managed. In April of 2019, the CNCF graduated Helm from incubation into becoming a full project, meaning that Helm will receive access to more resources than in the past.

Helm’s main features include:

Find and use popular K8s software packaged as Helm charts
Share K8s applications as Helm charts
Create reproducible builds of your Kubernetes applications
Manage Kubernetes manifest files
Manage Helm package releases

Helm is for everyone: Get a free Guide to Helm

Why Helm Charts?

Helm configuration files are referred to as charts and consist of a few YAML files with metadata and templates rendered into Kubernetes manifest files. The basic directory structure of a chart includes:

package-name/
  charts/
  templates/
  Chart.yaml
  LICENSE
  README.md
  requirements.yaml
  values.yaml

Using the helm command, you can install a chart from a local directory or from a `.tar.gz` packaged version of the above-mentioned directory structure. These packaged charts can also be downloaded and installed automatically from chart repositories..

Become a Helm Champ

There are a vast number of resources available to help you learn how to successfully use Helm to deploy your Kubernetes applications. Many of these resources are tutorials aimed at aiding beginners in understanding Helm and how it works.

Here are some of my favorite video tutorials that can help explore basic to advanced Helm concepts and practices.

1. What is Helm?

This introductory video tutorial about Helm was created by David Okun from IBM cloud. The quick tutorial walks through a typical scenario of using Helm to quickly define, manage and easily deploy applications and services in Kubernetes.

2. An Introduction to Helm

This video is hosted by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) and covers the basics of Helm and the makeup of charts. They also explain ways to share and consume Helm charts.

3. What is Helm in Kubernetes?

This video from Techworld covers the basics of Helm, templating engines and even the downsides of Helm. In the description of the video are timestamps which make it easy to find the portion of the tutorial that you need!

4. Helm and Kubernetes Introduction

Matthew Palmer introduces Node.js, Ruby and PHP developers to Helm for Kubernetes. This video covers an overview of Helm’s charts and releases as well as delving into the Helm Architecture. There is also a code example exercise of converting a regular Node.js and MongoDB web application into a Helm Chart.

5. Helm Chart Creation

Bitnami has a full Helm Chart tutorial available on Youtube. The tutorial is purposed for beginners to Helm and teaches how to create a Helm chart, deploy a sample application, add a dependency, package and share it.

6. Helm Chart Patterns

This video tutorial is from the CNCF and explains in-depth Helm Chart patterns and best practices for reviewing and maintaining the charts in the public Helm Chart repo.

7. Building Helm Charts from the Ground Up

This video tutorial is from the CNCF and gives a much more detailed explanation of key Kubernetes concepts when building Helm charts. This is a comprehensive guide for Helm charting.

8. Helm Security – A Look Below Deck

Matt Farina explains some of the basics of Helm security and provides a great overview of how the community is working together to build and improve upon many processes to keep your Kubernetes applications safe.

9. Helm 3 Deep Dive

This video is hosted by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Taylor Thomas of Microsoft Azure and Martin Hickey of IBM discuss the changes that occur in Helm v3. They talk about new features and the architecture that support those features. Topics covered range from changes to the CLI library to chart additions and new client security models.

10. Delve into Helm: Advanced DevOps

This advanced Helm tutorial dives deeply into Helm and focuses on lifecycle management and continuous delivery of Kubernetes-native applications in different environments. They show how to extend Helm’s capabilities with plugins and add-ons.

Helm On!

Additional Resources: