What’s the best way to manage Helm charts?

Background photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash

Whether you love it or hate it, Helm is a ubiquitous tool for managing Kubernetes applications. You can use it in many different ways which is great, but can also be overwhelming.

We’ve noticed that a couple of questions keep popping up:

• Where do you put your Helm charts?
  Do you keep them with the app files or use a chart repository?
• How do you divide up your Helm charts?
  Do you use one shared chart or maintain a chart for each service?

I’m going to try and address these questions based on our experience with the startups in our portfolio but I also draw on the perspectives of larger organizations too.

Here are the options that I’ll be outlining:

1. Using a chart repository to store one big shared chart
2. Using a chart repository to store many service-specific charts.
3. Using service-specific charts which are stored in the same repository as the service itself (spoiler alert: we prefer this one).

I’ll then cover factors such as dependency variance and team structure that you should consider when deciding on one of these options.

Option 1: Maintain one big shared chart in a chart repository