Comment by bigstrat2003
10 hours ago
Helm is a great tool, but you absolutely must keep it simple. We use Helm at work, and our charts are 95% hard-coded YAML templates, with an occasional sprinkling of a Helm variable for values which differ between dev/test/prod. It works great and is a ton easier than Kustomize for that purpose. But I would never want to maintain the super complex Helm charts you see in public repos.
> We use Helm at work, and our charts are 95% hard-coded YAML templates, with an occasional sprinkling of a Helm variable for values which differ between dev/test/prod. It works great and is a ton easier than Kustomize for that purpose.
I have come to precisely the opposite conclusion. I can count all of the helm charts that didn't make me immediately want to cry with one hand... and I'd have at least 2 fingers still free.
If you have "base, and then we change three things per environment", Kustomize is about as good as it gets using simple patches.
at $dayJob, we have templates wrapping templates and not a ton of tests on anything. Lots of implicit defaults that are not documented anywhere other than in the master/root chart defaults. As far as I can tell, this was how policy was meant to be enforced rather than something like OPA.
> If you have "base, and then we change three things per environment", Kustomize is about as good as it gets using simple patches.
Real talk, I could not for the life of me figure out how to use Kustomize. I spent a day or so poring over the documentation, and while I could recreate their hello world type examples, I couldn't figure out why they worked or how to make it work for our needs. Meanwhile, Helm immediately made sense and I had a chart banged out for the software I was trying to set up in under an hour.
I'm sure someone will tell me it's a skill issue, but Kustomize was simply way harder to use than Helm (or the documentation was worse, not sure which). So we wound up using Helm.
Then go change them?
I hate seeing public Helm charts that basically expose every single setting in the underlying manifests. What am I even using templates for then?