Please join us in wishing Helm and its community a very happy 5th birthday!
Helm is a popular package manager that provides an easy way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes. Our most recent Cloud Native Survey found it to be the most popular packaging tool for Kubernetes, used by more than 60% of respondents.
Helm was created in 2015 in a hackathon at Deis, a company that was later acquired by Microsoft. Since then, the project has come a very long way with open governance!
The project has been associated with CNCF since both of their beginnings. What is now known as Helm classic was introduced at the inaugural KubeCon in 2015. In 2016, the Helm team joined forces with Google, Skippbox, and Bitnami to produce Helm 2, which defined a workflow for creating, installing, and managing Helm charts.
In June 2018, Helm joined CNCF as an incubating project. The Helm Hub was launched later that year as a centralized home for Helm charts.
In November 2019, the Helm team released its biggest update to date with Helm 3. Helm 3 builds upon the Helm 2 workflow, changing the underlying infrastructure to reflect the community’s needs as they change and evolve.
2020 has been a very exciting year for the project. In April, Helm graduated from the CNCF incubator. The next month we published the Helm Project Journey Report, which measured the projects’ growth since joining CNCF. According to the report, the project currently has more than 30,000 GitHub stars and receives more than 2 million downloads a month worldwide.
The maintainers also recently migrated Helm Hub to Artifact Hub through community collaboration, where it now hosts more than 2,000 charts and other artifacts!
Today Helm is used in production by a variety of organizations, including AT&T, Bitnami, CERN, Conde Nast, Microsoft, VMWare, and many others. Since its inception, there have been more than 13,000 contributions, representing over 1,500 companies, to the Helm project.
As a birthday gift, GitHub will now be hosting the Helm stable and incubator chart repositories and we’d like to thank them for supporting the wider community. Read more about the project history and how GitHub is making chart downloads faster than ever from Matt Butcher, who made the first Helm commit on October 19, 2020, on the Helm blog!