Deploying Applications with Helm

Welcome! In this lesson, we'll dive into deploying applications using Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes.

Helm simplifies the process of defining, installing, and upgrading even the most complex Kubernetes applications. Think of it like apt or yum for your Kubernetes clusters!

Helm uses charts, which are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources. These charts are stored in chart repositories, which are essentially HTTP servers containing chart files.

Many organizations maintain public repositories, offering easy access to popular applications.

Before we can install charts, we need to tell Helm where to find them. We'll add the popular Bitnami repository, which hosts many common applications.

Use the helm repo add command:

After adding a repository, or periodically, it's a good idea to update your local Helm cache. This ensures you have the latest information about available charts and their versions.

Run helm repo update to fetch the latest changes from all configured repositories:

Now that our repositories are configured, we can search for applications. Let's find the Nginx web server chart using helm search repo:

This command will list all charts matching 'nginx' in our added repositories.

The core command for deploying an application with Helm is helm install. You give it a unique name for your release (your deployed instance) and the chart name.

Let's deploy Nginx. We'll also specify --set service.type=NodePort to make it accessible from outside the cluster.

After installing a chart, you can see all your active Helm releases with the helm list command.

This shows the release name, chart, namespace, status, and revision number for each deployment.

Applications often need updates. Helm makes this easy with helm upgrade. You can change configuration values or even update to a newer chart version.

Let's scale our Nginx deployment by increasing its replicaCount to 2:

When an application is no longer needed, Helm can cleanly remove all associated Kubernetes resources. Use helm uninstall followed by the release name.

This command will delete everything related to our my-nginx release.

You've learned how to manage applications with Helm. Let's test your knowledge of the basic commands.

Congratulations! You've learned how to leverage Helm to easily deploy and manage applications on Kubernetes.

• We added and updated chart repositories.
• We searched for available charts.
• We used helm install to deploy an application.
• We explored helm list to view releases.
• We upgraded our application with helm upgrade.
• Finally, we cleaned up with helm uninstall.

Helm truly makes managing complex applications on Kubernetes a breeze!