Helm and Charts in Kubernetes.

What are Charts ?

A chart is a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources. A single chart might be used to deploy something simple, like a memcached pod, or something complex, like a full web app stack with HTTP servers, databases, caches, and so on.

Charts are created as files laid out in a particular directory tree. They can be packaged into versioned archives to be deployed.

What is Helm ?

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm is the K8s equivalent of yum or apt. Helm deploys charts, which you can think of as a packaged application. It is a collection of all your versioned, pre-configured application resources which can be deployed as one unit. You can then deploy another version of the chart with a different set of configuration.

Helm helps in three key ways:

• Improves productivity
• Reduces the complexity of deployments of microservices
• Enables the adaptation of cloud native applications

Let’s create a chart and deploy it with HELM

Step 1> create a folder with same name as your package name

Create a file Chart.yaml inside the /app folder and write this inside it

Write a description and give proper version to it

Now create a templates folder. This is the folder where we have to store our yaml files

Step 2> Create a yaml file inside the templates folder

Yaml file ->

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: "new-pod1"
spec:
  containers:
  -  name:  "new-con1"
     image: "yashindane/keras-flask:v1"
     stdin: True
     tty: True

keras-flask:v1 is a image that contains the python environment and the libraries required for machine learning and web development

View the dockerfile here ->

Step 3 > Downloading and installing HELM

use wget command

untar by tar command

copy the helm to /usr/bin folder

now lets install our package by helm install command

Now let’s use kubectl get pods to see our pod

Thanks for Reading.