41 engineers on Hacker News describe using Helm first-hand: 7 endorse it, 9 regret it, 7 are mixed.
“Helm is a great tool, but you absolutely must keep it simple. We use Helm at work”
endorse · production · bigstrat2003 · 2026-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can count all of the helm charts that didn't make me immediately want to cry with one hand”
regret · production · baby_souffle · 2026-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The Docker images are complex for the sake of the Helm charts, which sometimes need to pass down tons of parameters”
mixed · production · tux3 · 2025-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Helm to apply and remove things -- and we loved version 3 when it came out”
endorse · production · devops99 · 2024-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I detest writing helm charts (and sometimes using them, as they can get "stuck" in several ways)”
mixed · production · raffraffraff · 2024-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I hate helm. For us, it led to a PITA knowing where values came from.”
regret · production · jml78 · 2024-04-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I often find a helm chart the helps me get set up.”
endorse · personal · mrj · 2024-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had created an impossible-to-validate, impossible-to-reason-about DSL in our values.yaml and that's when I realized we were at the end of our rope with Helm”
regret · production · btmiller · 2024-02-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I love how in Helm I can just look at the templates and figure out what values I need to change to get what I want”
endorse · production · cortesoft · 2023-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use helm to deploy our apps and it works. What Helm can't do currently is handle Ingress renames”
mixed · production · brainzap · 2023-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In our current setup it's not possible to rollout a new version of an Helm chart in dev, then in staging and finally in prod”
regret · production · denysvitali · 2023-09-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I patch it monthly (via Helm) and it's painless.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · tapoxi · 2022-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“helm is great at some things but the fact that does too many things leads to engineers shooting their foot”
mixed · production · atmosx · 2021-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“except for few Helm related issue, it gets the job done”
regret · production · klohto · 2020-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“you need to dive into changing a Chart template, requiring knowledge of not just the Kube API but also more often than not ugly template-fu”
regret · production · cfors · 2019-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've got less helm templating bullshit in there, but we still need boilerplate”
regret · production · 0.25 yr · DrJosiah · 2019-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For our own applications we found that there was just too much cognitive dissonance between the helm charts and the resulting resources.”
regret · production · markbnj · 2019-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Helm right now, though purely as a templating engine and destructive deployer of charts... The package management isn't useful for our own apps”
mixed · production · atombender · 2018-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's an extremely powerful tool. Our charts are full of things like this for that reason.”
mixed · production · atombender · 2018-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The only pain point we've run into with this model is that the configmaps that the service depends on... aren't created before the hook is called”
mixed · production · kronin · 2018-06-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We found the same thing after the package management stuff caused issues in prod.”
regret · production · shaftoe · 2018-01-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Using helm has let us define a redis cluster configuration that we know works well and anyone at the company can now launch one”
endorse · production · dkoston · 2016-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was using it at work and had designed some clean helm charts so just used them at home.”
neutral · production · steezeburger · 2026-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Chuck a set of random containers in prod -> Deploy helm chart -> Migrate to Thanos”
neutral · production · yarekt · 2025-04-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“if there are less nodes than required by the helmet chart, that fails.”
neutral · personal · lakomen · 2024-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We still use Helm, Quay & Drone.”
neutral · production · aguacaterojo · 2024-02-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“100 of those are deploy projects (they simply contain scripts, a dockerfile, helm values, etc.)”
neutral · production · hmeh · 2023-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“runs the Helm chart that we use for production, but against this specific preview namespace”
neutral · production · btown · 2022-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Helm charts for configuring everything (lots of YAML).”
neutral · production · brabel · 2022-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“then I run few shell scripts to install important stuff with helm, then I install our services with kustomize”
neutral · production · vbezhenar · 2022-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have helm charts and a bunch of bash scripts etc.”
neutral · production · RamblingCTO · 2022-02-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Just to name the ones we use at Helsinki City.”
neutral · production · gatestone · 2021-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have a helm chart that is heavily based on the one we use at Astronomer”
neutral · production · dimberman · 2020-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I also remember having to set up helm, according to whatever tutorial or official guide I was following.”
neutral · personal · zelphirkalt · 2020-09-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated to on-prem GitLab running on k8s via the official Helm chart a year ago.”
neutral · production · 1 yr · tapoxi · 2020-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're running Spilo/Patroni helm charts, and we've really tried to break our setup chaos monkey style.”
neutral · production · zumachase · 2020-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've recently started using Kompose to autogenerate Helm charts from docker compose files”
neutral · personal · jamougha · 2019-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated to a helm chart and custom orchestration tooling on top of that.”
neutral · production · halbritt · 2018-10-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we only use helm to render the templates - we do not utilize any of its deployment processes.”
neutral · production · xur17 · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use this to wrap Helm with a nice deployment tool that does a lot more”
neutral · production · lobster_johnson · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?