HELM: Managing Apps on Kubernetes

The term Kubernetes is Greek for "Helmsman" - the person responsible for steering a ship to safety. Kubernetes certainly solves a lot of hard problems once resources are provisioned, but how do we provision these resources in the first place? Furthermore, how can we do so repeatedly and reliably? What will guide our software to sunny shores?

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, bringing us ease and familiarity of tools such as apt, yum, or homebrew. Helm packages are known as "charts", or preconfigured bundles of Kubernetes resource YAMLs. Create a custom chart for your application, or pick from one of the 600 community-provided charts on Helm Hub to install things such as Wordpress.

Learn about all the features that Helm provides, from YAML templating, to release management, to working with chart repositories. We will describe and demo Helm-based developer workflows, on-demand environments, and zero-downtime application upgrades. We will also take a look at what to expect in Helm 3, the upcoming major release containing several new features and improvements.

Bio
Josh Dolitsky is Chief Engineer and Owner of Blood Orange LLC, an independent consulting firm specializing in Kubernetes onboarding. He has a strong background in web development (Go, Python, JavaScript) with a heavy focus on deployment and automation. He is the creator of ChartMuseum, an open-source Helm chart repository server, and is one of the Helm project org maintainers. He lives in Chicago with his wife and dog-child.

Location
Centare, 300 N. Executive Dr, Suite 300/3rd Floor, Brookfield, WI

Food
Pizza/beverages/beer will be provided!