Helm

If you need to automate the deployment of environments in Kubernetes and these environments should be easily replicable in other regions of your cloud provider or even in other cloud providers, then this is the tool for you. Just be prepared for a certain degree of complexity when creating the charts.

Deployment of helm charts is really fundamental to any software packages to our Kubernetes/docker containers, and without Helm, I cannot imagine how else to manage software components upgrades. When it works, it works great, when it doesn't - the world has not come to an end, there is rollback, and it's great, but troubleshooting does take time. And there is a learning curve. But it be worth it.

Helm is very well suited for setting up GitOps or DevOps pipelines, as well as quickly setting up large, complex applications, such as Gitlab, Elasticsearch/Kibana, Prometheus/Kibana or MySQL. We also use it intensely to deploy and configure smaller building blocks in the Cloud Native / Kubernetes area, such as Ingress Controller, Cert Manager, External DNS, OpenPolicyAgent, Falco, Fluentd, to name a few.

We didn't really need support, but the open-source community seemed responsive and informative when it came to issues. Many cloud native consultancy companies (including ourselves) offer support for Helm.