Ask Sendai

On October 15th, 2015, the project now known as Helm was born. Only one year later, the Helm community joined the Kubernetes organization as Helm 2 was fast approaching. In June 2018, the Helm community joined the CNCF as an incubating project. Fast forward to today, and Helm 3 is nearing its first alpha release. Helm 1 began as an open source project created by Deis. We were a small startup company acquired by Microsoft in the spring of 2017.

Helm is one of the best things about Kubernetes. (Which is why we talk about it in great depth here.) Rather than setting up an entirely new environment and configuring each kube object manually, you can now use Helm and Helm Charts—the template for different Kubernetes setups—to automate 90% of the work. For more on Helm Charts in full and how they’re designed to be flexible and robust, don’t forget to check out our Spotlight on Helm articles first. Helm is made even stronger with the help of a huge community of developers around it. Devs have found Helm Charts extremely useful, so they’ve begun developing tools, add-ons, and plugins for specific functions to enhance it further.