Helmfile - How to manage Kubernetes Helm releases

Helmfile is a declarative specification for deploying Helm charts in Kubernetes

#helmfile #helm #k8s #kubernetes

▬▬▬▬▬▬ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Intro
03:42 Setup
04:53 Defining a simple Helmfile
08:34 Updating releases
12:41 Defining multiple-releases
17:36 Applying templates
20:53 Discussing additional features
21:54 Destroying releases
22:12 Final thoughts

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[DevOpsToolkit]

What do you think? Is Helmfile worth the investment?

[vimalneha]

You are a great educator Viktor. No one has taught me more than you, be it at oreilly or toolkit series. Since 2017 i am learning from you.

[mattwdevops]

I was researching helmfile and this was perfect! There is not much out there for it. I agree that we should be moving to gitops tools instead of pipeline deployments but some places are not ready for that yet. Helmfile is a good next step past running helm commands in individual pipelines for each app.

[soubinan]

Definitely it worth the investment, at least for particular environments where:
- Deployments needs variable imbrication/combination of dependencies depending features requirements
- Applications releases need to be managed with some automation
- There is no real saas environment to leverage gitops principles in production
I was searching for a concrete demo and I had not found nothing really clear until now. Thank you a lot! So good content! as usual :)

[learnwithraghuIT]

The best real time knowledge on Kubernetes . Thanks a lot for these videos.

[javisartdesign]

Thanks ! just to clarify, the templating feature is also part of yaml language, See YAML Anchors and Aliases

[skurtzemann]

Thanks to take helmfile out of the shadows :)
I use it since 2019 and was great to install charts in a declarative way and mostly to have a diff before applying changes !

I agree with you : since I switch to Argo CD and GitOps pattern, i use less helmfile because it overlap...
But it's useful for local testing of charts

[nickweiler]

1:33 I believe these are referred to as 'Umbrella Charts.'

[bogdanbliznuk]

Thanks for the video, Viktor!
IMHO, layering and composition in kustomize look much better. Also, you can do some diff checks with the "kubectl diff " command.
Besides that extensibility & maintainability of the helm charts is still a big concern.
So, I'd pick a single tool for manifests management and layering - kustomize.

[AlexDresko]

I'm supposed to be going to sleep, but this was great!

[hz]

Thank you for the good review and the HONEST comparison <3

[yohenson]

I would say its the terraform version of helm. it even has init and apply. and by the way you are great teacher

[wollginator]

Good one, comes at the right time, thanks a lot!

[videonext]

I rather like how helmfile handles 'helmfile template --output-dir=XXX', compared to how helm does base. Instead of rendering out as a single giant yaml, it renders to a directory structure of each sub-chart and each template in that sub-chart. You can then commit that entire directory structure to git, to have a record of the rendered layout of the cluster definition in a format that is very nice for diffs and pull requests.

[Farrukhw]

Very informative and useful video... very well taught... Thank you :)

[tanzeemahmed]

Hi,
I really enjoy your teaching style.
I work as an automation tester and want to understand how to setup Jenkins on k8s such that every time I trigger a test run through Jenkins, a new Jenkins slave machine is created and destroyed after test run completes. Can you please recommend a good starting article or video that can help me get started? Thanks

[teebu]

great video, i wish you talked about the plugins for at least 30 more seconds. the helm-diff hits you right away and you feel like you're doing something wrong.

[TankaNafaka]

btw check direnv if you want to inject env vars dynamicaly when you cd to some dir with helmfiles

[JimBrännlund]

What about using Helmfile for "bootstrapping" a cluster. eg, installing the initially needed tools/applications (incl. ArgoCD) so once it's bootstrapped, you can use ArgoCD for your own applications?

[PatsevAnton]

Hi. Viktor. What do you think about helmwave?