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Helm vs Skaffold: What are the differences?

  1. Helm: Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies the deployment and management of applications. It allows users to define, install, and upgrade complex applications and their dependencies as Kubernetes resources.
  2. Skaffold: Skaffold is a command-line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. It automates the process of building, pushing, and deploying applications to a Kubernetes cluster, providing a streamlined workflow for iterative development.

  3. Installation and Configuration: Helm requires installing and configuring the Helm client and the associated Tiller server on the Kubernetes cluster. Skaffold, on the other hand, can be installed directly on the local machine or within the cluster without any additional server component.

  4. Deployment Workflow: Helm follows a declarative approach to deployment, where users define a chart containing all the necessary resources and configurations, and Helm takes care of deploying and managing those resources on the cluster. Skaffold, on the other hand, follows an iterative and continuous development workflow, where it monitors the code changes and automatically rebuilds and redeploys the application as needed.

  5. Use case: Helm is best suited for managing complex applications with multiple dependencies and configurations. It provides a way to package and share applications as charts, making it easier to deploy and manage them on different Kubernetes clusters. Skaffold, on the other hand, is designed for rapid and iterative development, where developers need a streamlined workflow to build, push, and deploy their applications to a Kubernetes environment.

  6. Integration with CI/CD: Helm integrates well with CI/CD pipelines and can be easily integrated into existing DevOps workflows. It allows for versioning, templating, and dependency management of applications, making it easier to automate the deployment process. Skaffold also integrates with CI/CD systems but focuses more on local development and testing workflows, providing live reloading and fast iterations during the development cycle.

In Summary, Helm is a powerful package manager for Kubernetes applications, while Skaffold provides a streamlined development workflow for iterative development on Kubernetes.

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    What is Helm?

    Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes.

    What is Skaffold?

    Skaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. You can iterate on your application source code locally then deploy to local or remote Kubernetes clusters. Skaffold handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application. It can also be used in an automated context such as a CI/CD pipeline to leverage the same workflow and tooling when moving applications to production.

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    What are some alternatives to Helm and Skaffold?
    Terraform
    With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
    Rancher
    Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
    Ansible
    Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
    Kubernetes
    Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
    Docker
    The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
    See all alternatives