Helm v4.0.0

https://github.com/helm/helm/releases/tag/v4.0.0

35•todsacerdoti•2h ago

Comments

buster•1h ago

After some work with kubernetes, i must really say, helm is a complexity hell. I'm sure it has much features but many aren't needed but increase the complexity nonetheless.

Also, please fix the "default" helm chart template, it's a nightmare of options and values no beginner understands. Make it basic and simple.

Nowadays i would very much prefer to just use terraform for kubernetes deployments, especially if you use terraform anyway!

nullwarp•1h ago

I don't think I've ever seen a Helm template that didn't invoke nightmares. Probably the biggest reason I moved away from Kubernetes in the first place.

bigstrat2003•1h ago

We have several Helm charts we've written at my job and they are very pleasant to use. They are just normal k8s templates with a couple of values parameterized, and they work great. The ones people put out for public consumption are very complex, but it isn't like Helm charts have to be that complex.

phyrog•1h ago

In my book the main problem with Helm charts is that every customization option needs to be implemented by the chart that way. There is no way for chart consumer to change anything the chart author did not allow to be changed. That leads to these overly complex and config heavy charts people publish - just to make sure everything is customizable for consumers.

I'd love something that works more like Kustomize but with other benefits of Helm charts (packaging, distribution via OCI, more straight forward value interpolation than overlays and patches, ...). So far none have ticked all my boxes.

glotzerhotze•22m ago

fluxCD brings a really nice helm-controller that will allow to change manifests via a postRenderers stub while still allowing to use regular helm tooling against the cluster.

https://fluxcd.io/flux/components/helm/helmreleases/#post-re...

phyrog•6m ago

Yeah, but then it is yet another layer of configuration slapped on top of the previous layer of configuration. That can't be the best solution, can it? Same thing for piping helm template through Kustomize.

honkycat•1h ago

Yes, this is the key. Helm charts should basically be manifests with some light customization.

Helm is not good enough to develop abstractions with. So go the opposite way: keep it stupid simple.

Pairing helm with Kustomize can help a lot as well. You do most of the templating in the helm chart but you have an escape hatch if you need more patches.

cogman10•1h ago

That's generally what I try to push for in my company.

A single purpose chart for your project is generally a lot easier to grok and consume vs what can be done.

I think the likes of "kustomize" is probably a more sane route to go down. But our entire infrastructure is already helm so hard to switch that all out.

bigstrat2003•26m ago

I'm ashamed to say it but I cannot for the life of me understand how kustomize works. I could not ever figure out how to do things outside the "hello world" tutorials they walk you through. I'm not a stupid person (citation needed lol), but trying to understand the kustomize docs made me feel incredibly stupid. That's why we didn't go with that instead of Helm.

dev_l1x_be•48m ago

What did you move to?

verdverm•1h ago

Helm is my example of where DevOps lost it's way. The insanity of multiple tiers on templating an invisible char scoped language... it blows my mind that so many of us just deal with it

Nowadays I'm using CUE in front of TF & k8s, in part because I have workloads that need a bit of both and share config. I emit tf.json and Yaml as needed from a single source of truth

mkroman•1h ago

shudders.. `| nindent 12`..

I've been trying to apply CUE to my work, but the tooling just isn't there for much of what I need yet. It also seems really short-sighted that it is implemented in Go which is notoriously bad for embedding.

hvenev•1h ago

Back when my job involved using Kubernetes and Helm, the solution I found was to use `| toJson` instead: it generates one line that happens to be valid YAML as well.

verdverm•54m ago

> seems really short-sighted that it is implemented in Go

CUE was a fork of the Go compiler (Marcel was on the Go team at the time and wanted to reuse much of the infra within the codebase)

Also, so much of the k8s ecosystem is in Go that it was a natural choice.

candiddevmike•1h ago

RIP Ksonnet, we hardly knew what we were missing

verdverm•56m ago

jsonnet is the main DX issue therein

timiel•1h ago

Do you have any resources regarding using tf to handle deployments ?

I’d love to dig a bit.

Aeolun•1h ago

The kubernetes provider mostly just works exactly as you expect

jadbox•1h ago

I don't think I want to use kubernetes (or anything that uses it) again. Nightmare of broken glass. Back in the day Docker Compose gave me 95% of what I wanted and the complexity was basically one file with few surprises.

lxe•1h ago

Docker Compose still takes you 95% of what you need. I wish Docker Swarm survived.

Alir3z4•45m ago

What happened to it?

I'm still using it with not a single issue (except when is messes up the iptables rules)

I still confidently, upgrade the docker across all the nodes, workers and managers and it just works. Not a single time that it caused an issue.

lxe•42m ago

For some reason I assumed it was unsupported. That doesn't seem to be the case.

Cyphus•11m ago

The original iteration of Docker Swarm, now known as Classic, is deprecated. Maybe you were thinking of that?

lxe•6m ago

As I read more about it, yes, that is indeed the case.

Cyphus•13m ago

Docker the company bet big on Swarm being the de facto container orchestration platform for businesses. It just got completely overshadowed by k8s. Swarm continues to exist and be actively developed, but it’s doomed to fade into obscurity.

pphysch•57m ago

If you can confidently get it done with docker-compose, you shouldn't even think about using k8s IMO. Completely different scales.

K8s isn't for running containers, it's for implementing complex distributed systems: tenancy/isolation and dynamic scaling and no-downtime service models.

lxe•1h ago

Infrastructure as code should from the beginning have been through a strict typed language with solid dependency and packaging contract.

I know that there are solutions like CDK and SST that attempt this, but because the underlying mechanisms are not native to those solutions, it's simply not enough, and the resulting interfaces are still way too brittle and complex.

JohnMakin•14m ago

I mean terraform provides this but using it doesn't give a whole lot of value, at least IME. I enforce types but often an upstream provider implementation will break that convention. It's rarely the fault of the IAC itself and usually the fault of the upstream service when things get annoying.

dev_l1x_be•48m ago

Could you explain this a bit? Is helm optional part of the k8s stack?

pests•44m ago

Helm is not official or blessed or anything, just another third party tool people install after install k8s.

JamesSwift•25m ago

Helm is sort of like a docker (or maybe docker compose) for k8s, in terms of a helm chart is a prepackaged k8s "application" that you can ship to your cluster. It got very popular very quickly because of the ease of use, and I think that was premature which affects its day-to-day usability.

buster•44s ago

Yes, you really don't need to use helm if you have terraform. Just use https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/kubernetes... .

If you used helm + terraform before, you'll have no problem understanding the terraform kubernetes provider (as opposed to the helm provider).

zdw•1h ago

Helm is truly a fractal of design pain. Even the description as a "package manager" is a verifiable lie - it's a config management tool at best.

Any tool that encourages templating on top of YAML, in a way that prevents the use of tools like yamllint on them, is a bad tool. Ansible learned this lesson much earlier and changed syntax of playbooks so that their YAML passes lint.

Additionally, K8s core developers don't like it and keep inventing things like Kustomize and similar that have better designs.

torginus•45m ago

Imho, anyone who thought putting 'templating language' and 'significant whitespace' together is a good idea deserves to be in the Hague

Cyphus•2m ago

Seriously. I’ve lost at least 100 hours of my life debugging whitespace in templated yaml. I shudder to think about the total engineering time wasted since yaml’s invention.

honkycat•1h ago

What is Charts v3? Please tell me it is LUA support.

hobofan•59m ago

I think what Charts v3 will be is still an open question. According to the current accepted HIPs[0], there is some groundwork to in general enable a new generation of a chart format via HIP-0020, and most HIPs after that contain some parts that are planned to make it into Charts v3 (e.g. resource creation sequencing via HIP-0025).

[0]: https://github.com/helm/community/tree/main/hips

lugoues•59m ago

Ugh, can we all just agree to stop using helm

verdverm•52m ago

would be nice, but we would also have to reimplement all of the charts we use, big ask/lift

DevOps has more friction for tooling changes because of the large blast radius

pphysch•52m ago

What do you prefer?

NeckBeardPrince•13m ago

Just straight raw manifest files.

honkycat•50m ago

Helm sucks.

Helm, and a lot of devops tooling, is fundamentally broken.

The core problem is that it is a templating language and not a fully functional programming language, or at least a DSL.

This leads us to the mess we are in today. Here is a fun experiment: Go open 10 helm charts, and compare the differences between them. You will find they have the same copy-paste bullshit everywhere.

Helm simply does not provide powerful enough tools to develop proper abstractions. This leads to massive sprawl when defining our infrastructure. This leads to the DevOps nightmare we have all found ourselves in.

I have developed complex systems in Pulumi and other CDKs: 99% of the text just GOES AWAY and everything is way more legible.

You are not going to create a robust solution with a weak templating language. You are just going to create more and more sprawl.

Maybe the answer is a CDK that outputs helm charts.

CraigJPerry•32m ago

Imagine 1,000s of helm charts. Your only abstraction tools are an umbrella chart or a library chart. There isn't much more in helm.

I liked KRO's model a lot but stringly typed text templating at the scale of thousands of services doesn't work, it's not fun when you need to make a change. I kinda like jsonnet plus the google cli i forget the name of right now, and the abstraction the Grafana folks did too but ultimately i decided to roll my own thing and leaned heavily into type safety for this. It's ideal. With any luck i can open source it. There's a few similar ideas floating around now - Scala Yaga is one.

woile•21m ago

Now that you'll are here, has anyone tried timoni as an alternative to helm? I have it in my to-try-tools.

https://github.com/stefanprodan/timoni

NeckBeardPrince•10m ago

No commits in 3 months.

greenwallnorway•17m ago

Can I hear from those of you who have had a good IAC experience? What tools worked well?

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