Helm Charts: Simplify Kubernetes App Management

Helm is the de facto standard for packaging and deploying applications in Kubernetes. But as your organization grows from a few clusters to a global fleet, the complexity multiplies. How do you enforce consistent observability configs across environments? How do you manage security policies and push critical updates without manual intervention?

At this scale, using the Helm CLI alone isn’t enough—it leads to configuration drift, inconsistent releases, and operational overhead. This article goes beyond the basics, exploring how to scale Helm usage in large, distributed environments. You'll learn how to adopt a centralized, GitOps-driven workflow that brings consistency, automation, and control to your entire fleet.

Key takeaways:

• Treat deployments as packages: Use Helm charts to bundle all your application's Kubernetes resources into a single, versioned unit. This eliminates manual kubectl commands and makes deployments consistent and repeatable.
• Define once, customize anywhere: Leverage Helm's templating to create a reusable application blueprint. By overriding values for each environment, you can maintain consistency while accommodating specific needs for development, staging, and production.
• Automate Helm at scale with GitOps: To manage Helm across many clusters, adopt a GitOps workflow. A platform like Plural uses this approach to provide a central control plane for orchestrating deployments, ensuring fleet-wide consistency and security.

What Is a Helm Chart?

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes, comparable to apt for Debian or npm for Node.js. It streamlines how you define, deploy, and manage applications in a Kubernetes cluster by working with packages called charts. A Helm chart bundles Kubernetes manifests for a complete application—Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and more—into a versioned, reusable unit.

This packaging model is essential for managing complex applications like Prometheus or Airflow, which require many interdependent Kubernetes resources. Instead of manually applying YAML files one by one, you install and upgrade the entire application with a single Helm command. This promotes repeatability, simplifies version control, and minimizes drift across environments.

At scale, Helm charts are the foundation for standardizing workloads. In Plural, for example, Helm powers a GitOps-based deployment engine that syncs chart-based applications declaratively across fleets of clusters, ensuring consistency, visibility, and control.

How Helm Simplifies Kubernetes Operations

Helm simplifies app lifecycle management by packaging everything—manifests, configurations, dependencies—into a single chart. You define your templates once and deploy them to dev, staging, and prod using environment-specific values files, without editing the manifests themselves.

Key benefits:

• Templating: Parameterize your YAML for reuse across clusters and environments.
• Rollbacks: Roll back to a previous release with a single command.
• Upgrades: Apply changes in a controlled, trackable way.

This reduces manual kubectl usage, limits human error, and brings structure to otherwise chaotic deployments.

Helm Chart Structure: Key Components

A Helm chart follows a predictable directory layout:

• Chart.yaml: Metadata about the chart—name, version, and description. Uses SemVer for versioning.
• values.yaml: The default configuration. Users override values here without touching templates.
• templates/: The core of the chart. Contains parameterized Kubernetes manifests rendered during installation.
• charts/: Optional. Lets you manage dependencies on other charts—ideal for composing applications from modular building blocks.

Understanding this structure is the first step toward building reusable, scalable application packages in Kubernetes.

Why Use Helm for Your Applications?

Helm is the standard for packaging, deploying, and managing Kubernetes applications declaratively. For teams operating at scale, it provides the structure and automation needed to reduce manual overhead, enforce consistency, and simplify lifecycle management across environments.

Streamline Complex Deployments

Modern applications often span dozens of Kubernetes resources: Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, and more. Managing these manually through individual YAML files introduces risk and slows delivery.

Helm solves this by bundling everything into a single versioned unit: the chart. A Helm chart represents your application as a cohesive package, making deployments predictable and repeatable. One command installs or upgrades all components in sync. This model is foundational for managing apps at scale, and it’s why Plural uses Helm as the core of its Continuous Deployment engine.

Track Versions and Roll Back Instantly

When an upgrade fails, fast rollback matters. Helm tracks a versioned history of every installation (called a release), so you can roll back to a stable version instantly, without manually reverting individual manifests.

helm rollback my-app 1

This atomic, audit-friendly workflow turns risky updates into safe, reversible operations—essential for production-grade systems.

Customize Configurations Without Drift

Helm’s templating system separates logic from configuration. You define manifests using templates, and inject environment-specific values via values.yaml. This lets you reuse the same chart across dev, staging, and production—without duplicating code or hardcoding values.

helm install my-app ./chart -f values-prod.yaml

This “define once, customize anywhere” model eliminates configuration drift and ensures consistency. Plural extends this model to multi-cluster deployments with Global Services, enabling configuration parity across fleets.

How to Create and Use Helm Charts

Helm charts bring structure and automation to Kubernetes deployments, making application delivery predictable and repeatable. Whether you’re deploying a stateless microservice or a complex stateful system, the Helm CLI and chart structure give you a consistent workflow for packaging, deploying, and managing applications across environments.

Create Your First Chart

Start by scaffolding a new chart:

helm create my-new-app

This generates a standard directory layout containing:

• Chart.yaml: Metadata about your chart (name, version, description).
• values.yaml: Default configuration values, which users can override during deployment.
• templates/: The Kubernetes manifest templates written in Go template syntax, rendered using values at install time.
• charts/: Optional subcharts or dependencies your chart relies on.

This structure makes your chart portable and understandable to any engineer familiar with Helm.

Work with the Helm CLI

Once your chart is defined, use the Helm CLI to manage the full application lifecycle:

Install a release:

helm install my-app ./my-new-app

Upgrade with new values or chart versions:

helm upgrade my-app ./my-new-app -f prod-values.yaml

Uninstall the release:

helm uninstall my-app

Helm translates your templates into standard Kubernetes objects and applies them using the Kubernetes API, removing the need for repetitive kubectl apply commands.

Follow Best Practices

Creating maintainable charts means following some key guidelines:

• Use Semantic Versioning for version in Chart.yaml to signal breaking changes clearly.
• Include a README.md with usage instructions, supported configurations, and example values.
• Structure values.yaml for clarity, grouping related configs and documenting default values.
• Allow overrides via --set for quick tweaks or -f custom-values.yaml for full environment-specific configuration.

Following these practices makes your charts easier to reuse, extend, and debug—both for others and for your future self.

Test and Debug Before You Deploy

Before pushing a chart to production:

• Run helm lint to catch syntax and formatting issues.
• Render the chart locally:

helm template . -f my-values.yaml

• This outputs the Kubernetes manifests without deploying them—ideal for CI pipelines or manual review.

After deployment, monitor application health using:

• helm status <release-name> to inspect rollout progress
• kubectl get all or kubectl describe for resource-level debugging

For centralized visibility across clusters, Plural provides a secure, embedded Kubernetes dashboard. It lets your team inspect workloads and releases in real time—without juggling kubeconfig files or exposing your API server—ensuring your Helm deployments are running as expected.

Mastering Advanced Helm Techniques

Once you're comfortable with Helm's basics, it’s time to leverage its advanced features to handle production-grade workloads. These techniques provide fine-grained control over application lifecycles, dependencies, templating, and security, helping you build scalable, reliable systems that can be managed declaratively and repeatedly.

Manage Chart Dependencies

Kubernetes applications are rarely standalone. Helm supports chart dependencies so you can compose multi-service applications without duplicating configurations. Declare dependencies in the Chart.yaml under the dependencies field, and Helm will fetch and include the required charts automatically during packaging or installation.

For example, your web application chart might depend on the Bitnami PostgreSQL chart. This promotes reuse and lets you build on top of battle-tested components rather than reinventing them.

dependencies:
  - name: postgresql
    version: 12.x.x
    repository: https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

Use helm dependency update to pull in and lock versions before deploying.

Control Lifecycle with Helm Hooks

Helm hooks let you run Kubernetes resources at specific points in a release lifecycle—pre-install, post-upgrade, pre-delete, and more. This is critical for tasks like:

• Running database migrations before app pods start
• Cleaning up external resources after uninstall
• Initializing caches or validating prerequisites

Hooks are declared like regular resources but include an annotation:

annotations:
  "helm.sh/hook": pre-install

Use them judiciously—improper hook usage can make deployments harder to troubleshoot.

Advanced Templating with Go Templates

Helm’s templating engine lets you generate highly dynamic Kubernetes manifests. Go templates support conditionals, loops, and built-in functions that adapt your chart to any environment.

Example: Dynamically generate multiple Ingress rules:

{{- range .Values.hosts }}
- host: {{ . }}
  http:
    paths:
    - path: /
      backend:
        service:
          name: {{ $.Values.service.name }}
          port:
            number: 80
{{- end }}

Use helm template to render your manifests locally and validate output before applying.

Secure Charts and Handle Secrets Properly

Never hardcode secrets like API keys or credentials in your values.yaml or templates. Instead:

• Reference Kubernetes Secrets from your templates
• Pass sensitive values securely via --set or encrypted values files
• Integrate with external secrets managers like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager

For enterprise-grade access control, Plural extends this security model with SSO integration and centralized RBAC enforcement. This ensures that all Helm interactions are authenticated and authorized via your identity provider, keeping sensitive operations under strict control.

How to Integrate Helm with a CI/CD Pipeline

Integrating Helm into your CI/CD pipeline brings automation and consistency to Kubernetes application delivery. Rather than relying on manual helm upgrade commands, you define a repeatable deployment process where every commit or merge can trigger a tested, version-controlled release to your cluster. This not only shortens release cycles but also reduces the risk of regressions and simplifies rollbacks.

For simple environments, scripting Helm commands into existing CI tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI is often sufficient. But as you scale to multiple clusters and applications, manual script maintenance becomes a bottleneck. Platforms like Plural build on GitOps principles to automate Helm deployments across fleets, adding auditability, promotion gates, and centralized control.

Automate Chart Deployments

To automate Helm deployments, embed the necessary Helm CLI commands in your pipeline configuration. The most commonly used command is:

helm upgrade --install my-app ./charts/my-app -f values-prod.yaml

This idempotent command installs the chart if it doesn’t exist or upgrades it if it does, ensuring consistent state across environments.

Example GitLab CI job:

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - helm dependency update ./charts/my-app
    - helm upgrade --install my-app ./charts/my-app -f values-prod.yaml
  only:
    - main

This deploys your application whenever code is merged into the main branch. For teams managing many clusters and applications, this approach becomes difficult to scale. Plural’s Continuous Deployment engine eliminates the need for per-pipeline scripts by defining reusable, gated workflows that manage promotions, syncs, and rollbacks across clusters declaratively.

Manage Versions in the Pipeline

Pinning exact chart versions is essential for reproducibility and traceability. Always use a versioned Helm chart, declared in Chart.yaml, to deploy known-good configurations into each environment.

For example, deploy version 1.2.0 to production while testing 1.3.0 in staging:

helm upgrade --install my-app ./charts/my-app --version 1.2.0 -f values-prod.yaml

Avoid using the latest tag or deploying from uncommitted local directories. This ensures your deployment history is auditable and rollback-friendly.

At scale, coordinating versions manually across environments introduces risk. Plural’s Global Services feature lets you define a shared service that is replicated across all clusters, ensuring every environment runs the same chart version and config, with minimal effort. It centralizes version control and simplifies coordinated upgrades across your fleet.

Helm vs. Other Deployment Tools

Kubernetes offers several options for deploying applications, ranging from raw manifests to higher-level tools like Helm and Kustomize. Each approach has its own strengths and trade-offs. Your choice depends on the scale of your environment, your team’s workflow, and how much abstraction you're comfortable with. At Plural, we’ve seen organizations succeed with all three—so our Continuous Deployment engine is designed to support GitOps workflows no matter which format you choose.

Helm vs. Raw Kubernetes Manifests

Using raw Kubernetes manifests means directly managing YAML files for each resource—Deployment, Service, ConfigMap, and so on. This provides full transparency and control, but at scale it becomes unwieldy. You'll likely encounter repeated boilerplate, configuration drift, and challenges in promoting consistent changes across environments.

Helm solves this by packaging related Kubernetes objects into a single, versioned chart. Instead of manually applying a dozen files, you can deploy, upgrade, or rollback an application with a single command like helm upgrade --install. This encapsulation simplifies deployments, improves consistency, and makes reuse far easier—especially for complex applications like Prometheus or Airflow.

Helm vs. Kustomize

Helm and Kustomize both address the need for reusable, environment-specific configuration, but they take different approaches.

Helm uses Go templating to inject values into resource definitions. This makes it ideal for distributing applications with many customizable knobs—such as off-the-shelf software or internal platforms shared across teams. However, its abstraction can make it harder to reason about the final YAML output, especially in large charts.

Kustomize, by contrast, is a patch-based system with no templating. You define a set of base resources and apply overlays for each environment. It keeps your YAML files valid and readable at all stages and is tightly integrated with kubectl apply -k. For teams that prefer minimal abstraction and clearer diffability, Kustomize offers a clean, declarative alternative to Helm’s template engine.

How to Find and Share Helm Charts

Once you're comfortable building and deploying your own Helm charts, tapping into the broader Helm ecosystem can accelerate development and streamline operations. The Helm community offers a wide range of pre-built charts and collaborative tools that help you avoid starting from scratch and ensure best practices are baked into your deployments.

Discover Charts in Public Repositories

You don’t need to write every chart yourself. The Artifact Hub is the central repository for discovering publicly maintained Helm charts. It aggregates charts for widely used tools like Prometheus, NGINX, and PostgreSQL, providing vetted, production-ready templates that you can use as-is or extend to suit your environment.

For internal use, many teams host private Helm repositories to share custom charts across the organization. This allows platform teams to define standard, compliant base charts for common workloads, ensuring developers follow internal policies without duplicating effort. Platforms like Plural simplify this further by managing these charts as versioned GitOps resources, enabling consistent deployment across all environments.

Contribute to the Helm Community

Helm is an open-source project maintained by the CNCF and supported by a strong contributor community. If you create a reusable chart or identify improvements to existing ones, contributing back helps the ecosystem grow and improves tooling for everyone. The Helm Developer Guide offers documentation on how to submit charts and participate in project development.

For questions or discussions, you can join the CNCF Slack in #helm-users for general help or #helm-dev for contributing and deeper technical topics. The project also maintains a list of good first issues to help new contributors get started.

Actively engaging with the Helm community gives you early insight into new features, access to support, and the opportunity to help shape the future of Kubernetes package management.

Using Helm at Enterprise Scale

Helm is a powerful tool for packaging and deploying Kubernetes applications, but managing it at enterprise scale introduces a new class of challenges. When you're handling hundreds of Helm releases across dozens or hundreds of clusters, manual processes break down quickly. How do you enforce version consistency for core add-ons like NGINX or Prometheus? How do you prevent configuration drift and ensure that every cluster complies with your security policies?

Relying on ad hoc Helm CLI usage is not sustainable. It leads to drift, brittle upgrades, and unpredictable environments. Instead, large-scale Helm usage demands a GitOps-driven, declarative workflow—one where all chart versions, configuration values, and deployment actions are defined in version control and enforced automatically across your infrastructure. This section explores how platforms like Plural operationalize Helm at enterprise scale, bringing order and control to fleet-wide Kubernetes management.

Scale Helm Across Large Deployments

At scale, the core challenge is maintaining consistency. You need to ensure that every cluster runs the correct versions of key workloads and has standardized configurations for observability, networking, and security.

Plural’s Continuous Deployment engine addresses this by syncing Helm charts from Git to any number of Kubernetes clusters. It runs a secure, lightweight agent in each cluster that pulls configurations automatically—no need to open inbound ports or manage per-cluster CI pipelines. Every cluster stays in sync with a central, versioned source of truth.

For truly global workloads, Plural supports GlobalServices, which lets you define a Helm-based service—like an ingress controller or a logging agent—once and deploy it everywhere. This ensures uniformity across your entire fleet, reduces the risk of misconfiguration, and drastically cuts the time required to roll out updates.

Address Security and Compliance

Enterprises must also harden Helm workflows with access controls, policy enforcement, and auditability. Helm’s default model offers little in terms of multi-user access control or compliance guarantees, but Plural layers robust security on top of native Kubernetes mechanisms.

Access is managed using your existing OIDC provider (e.g., Okta, Azure AD, Google), and enforced via standard Kubernetes RBAC. Plural uses Kubernetes impersonation to ensure users can only deploy resources within their assigned roles. Want to restrict deployment access for staging versus production clusters? You define it in code, and Plural enforces it.

You can also declaratively define fleet-wide RBAC rules, network policies, and security agents using GlobalServices. These get versioned in Git and deployed consistently to all clusters. Since every change is a Git commit, you gain a complete audit trail—what was deployed, when, by whom—enabling traceability and simplifying incident response or compliance reporting.

Why This Matters

Without a centralized, GitOps-based approach, Helm usage at scale becomes a mess of disconnected workflows, fragile scripts, and risky upgrades. With Plural, Helm charts become building blocks for secure, repeatable, and automated deployments across your entire Kubernetes footprint.

As your platform engineering team evolves from managing clusters to managing fleets, this transition becomes critical, not just for operational efficiency, but for delivering a secure and compliant foundation for your business-critical apps.

Related Articles

• Managing Kubernetes Resources with Helm: A Practical Guide
• Secure Helm Charts: Best Practices for 2024

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the real difference between using Helm and Kustomize? The fundamental difference comes down to their core philosophies: Helm is a package manager that uses templating, while Kustomize is a configuration customizer that uses patching. Helm bundles an entire application into a versioned chart, using a templating engine to inject values for different environments. This is great for distributing complex, self-contained applications. Kustomize, on the other hand, starts with standard, template-free Kubernetes manifests and applies environment-specific "overlays" or patches. Many find this approach more direct and easier to debug since you're always working with valid YAML. The right tool depends on your team's workflow, and a flexible platform like Plural supports GitOps-driven deployments regardless of whether you choose Helm, Kustomize, or even raw manifests.

How should I handle sensitive information like API keys or passwords in my Helm charts? You should never hardcode secrets directly into your chart's values.yaml file or templates. The standard practice is to create Kubernetes Secret objects outside of the chart and then have your application's deployment reference those secrets. This separates sensitive data from your application configuration. For more robust security, you can integrate with an external secrets manager like HashiCorp Vault. A platform like Plural adds another layer of security by managing access to the cluster itself. By using SSO integration and native Kubernetes RBAC, you ensure that only authorized users and automated systems can perform deployments, reducing the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive configurations.

My Helm deployments are failing. What are the first steps to troubleshoot? When a deployment fails, start with static checks before looking at the live cluster. Run helm lint on your chart to catch formatting issues and helm template to render the final Kubernetes manifests locally. This allows you to inspect the generated YAML for configuration errors without deploying anything. If the chart has already been deployed, the issue is likely at runtime. Instead of switching between multiple command-line tools, you can use Plural’s embedded Kubernetes dashboard to get a secure, unified view of your release. From there, you can inspect pod logs and events to diagnose common problems like image pull errors or resource scheduling failures.

How can I ensure consistent configurations, like for logging or ingress, across dozens of clusters using Helm? Relying on manual Helm commands to maintain consistency across a large fleet of clusters is not a scalable strategy and inevitably leads to configuration drift. The solution is to adopt a centralized, declarative approach. This is precisely what Plural's GlobalService feature is designed for. You can define a standard Helm-based service for a critical component like an NGINX ingress controller or a monitoring agent once. Plural will then automatically ensure that this service is deployed and kept in sync across all targeted clusters, enforcing uniformity and simplifying fleet-wide management.

Does using Helm mean I have to manage everything with the Helm CLI? No, the Helm CLI is primarily for local development, testing, and direct interaction. In a production environment, you should integrate Helm into an automated CI/CD pipeline. This workflow treats your application deployments as code, where changes to your Helm charts in a Git repository trigger the pipeline to automatically run helm upgrade --install commands. Plural’s Continuous Deployment engine formalizes this process by providing a complete GitOps-driven workflow with features like automated pull requests and approval gates. This turns your Helm deployments into a fully managed, auditable process that scales securely with your organization.