Deploying complex applications across multiple environments is hard, and time-consuming. There has to be a better way! Helm is the solution to this problem! It allows you to package your application as a chart and deploy it with one command. Helm integrates with many popular tools, like Jenkins and Gitlab CI/CD, so you don’t have to worry about running into issues when deploying complex applications across multiple cloud providers.
But, helm as a solution to this problem is just a promise, because deploying applications with helm is slow and tedious. The Helm chart is a complex file structure that needs to be built and stored in a version control system. For your application to be deployed, the Helm chart needs to be built on every node in your cluster (by default). This can take anywhere from 10 minutes up to an hour depending on how many resources are available.
Deploying complex applications with helm is a pain. It is too slow and unwieldy. It creates more work than it saves and wastes resources (time, effort, money) that could be better spent on other things. It is time-consuming, and it makes it difficult to iterate quickly on your application’s architecture. That's why we create helmee, a simple, fast and easy-to-use tool for deploying applications on Kubernetes. Helmee makes it easy to provision a new application in different Kubernetes cluster instances, deploy it instantly with Helm chart or git repo, and then tear down the entire application when you need to move on.
Why helm is not the holy grail?
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. It allows you to install new applications into your cluster and also provides the ability to upgrade or downgrade those applications if needed.
It’s a great tool that enables many useful features like rolling upgrades, canary deployments (instantly test new versions of your application before rolling them out), blue/green deployments (redeploying only affected pods when updating applications) and more.
But all that is only possible for a single cluster; have you tried to replicate the deployment of complex helm charts to a different environment? Too many variables and files to modify!
No worry, Helmee is here to automate those deployments!