Community post by Robert Sirchia (SUSE), Matt Farina (SUSE), and Jorge O. Castro (CNCF)
As cloud native heads into its second decade, we’d like to spend some time talking about Helm and its future. Helm was one of the earliest tools being used in cloud native. The Helm project predates the creation of CNCF (one of the reasons the Helm channel is in the Kubernetes Slack instance and not the CNCF Slack). It is hard to compare Helm to any other project that has been around for a year or two. It has developed and grown alongside other projects and has had to adapt to major changes in the landscape.
If Helm were a company, it wouldn’t be a startup. It would be a corporation.
If we use the analogy of a company and then look at the adoption of Helm, one could take it one step further and say that Helm isn’t just a corporation, it is an enterprise. Helm is widely used and has been adopted as an industry standard. From hobbyists to enterprises, even the US government uses Helm. This adoption was gradual but steady to get to this point. This transformation is akin to what happened to Linux and Kubernetes; they started as small projects and were adopted by everyone including enterprises. For nearly a decade, the Helm maintainers have strived to innovate while delivering a project that many enterprises depend on.
Photo from Helm Contribfest at CloudNativeCon/KubeCon North America ‘24
Cloud Native isn’t just about software, though. If we look at the community around Helm it didn’t undergo this same transformation. It’s not uncommon for contributor attention to gravitate towards larger projects like Kubernetes and Linux or towards new experiments. Helm doesn’t have the “big city problems” that Kubernetes may have, and it doesn’t change to the same degree an experiment or startup does. However, this component is still critical to a platform team.
Helm wasn’t adapting fast enough. This sluggishness led to contributor friction, and the Helm project was in limbo. Contributions were down, and the contributions that were being sent were getting held up from a lack of maintainer engagement. The Helm maintainers had to start making a shift. We needed to mature our community like Kubernetes did but without all of the overhead and processes that Kubernetes has.
Therefore, the team decided that 2025 would be the year to focus on contributor growth, streamlining processes, and ultimately bringing in the next generation of contributors who will take Helm 4 into the next decade. We reached out to the CNCF and put together a quick plan to help start the shift. Here are the findings we’d like to share with the community:
Prune the Garden
First, we looked at our maintainer list. Reaching out to inactive or low active maintainers and asking each of them if this is still something they were able to help contribute to. These conversations were difficult; these maintainers put in a lot of time and effort to get the project to where it was. To do this, we made the Emeritus status a good thing. Maintainer Emeritus is the final title anyone can get, and it is just as important as the title maintainer. Of course, if an emeritus maintainer wants to be actively involved again, they are welcomed back to regular activity. This allowed us to open up the project to new maintainers by allowing the experienced maintainers to instead focus on contributor growth. Helm co-creator Matt Butcher explains:
Engaging with New Contributors
With a fresh set of maintainers, we increased engagement with our contributor community. There was a bit of neglect in different parts of the project, not for anything malicious but just the lack of maintainer engagement. We got back to pull requests faster and provided feedback.
Something as small as adding testing is a great way to get contributors engaged. Sure, tests aren’t the most exciting part of coding, but they are the best way to start contributing to any project as automated testing is improved and a new contributor learns how a project is put together.
Now that we corrected our challenges with maintainers and had a clear path for new contributors, we needed to find more contributors. We worked closely with the CNCF. To reach out to the community and to partner companies to solicit the need for more contributors. With the kick-off of the Helm v4 development, the Helm project has seen an increase in contributions with more first-time contributors and a reinvigoration of existing contributors.
Set a Timeline with Actionable Goals
Timelines are useful when you want to achieve goals. With so many things to work on, it’s often the fire in front of you that gets your attention. Timelines and milestones help you achieve goals and can bring focus to the important things. Some of the goals and timelines we set were:
- Move the inactive maintainers to Emeritus and move some in the community who are active to maintainer status by CloudNativeCon/KubeCon NA ‘24
- Open Helm v4 up for development by the start of November ‘24 so we can discuss it at conferences like CloudNativeCon/KubeCon.
- Release Helm v4 for CloudNativeCon/KubeCon NA ‘25. This provides a one-year window for development and a release date during a major conference for awareness and will keep the maintainers focused.
Event Strategy
Every booth, every CFP, every event where people might be, make those strategic goals. This gives us actionable milestones where we can reach out and target possible new contributors. It is also a great time to plan out face-to-face discussions and interact with the community.
Reach out to End Users
For 2025 the team will be reaching out to CNCF End Users more actively. In the past, many contributors worked at tech companies that were building Kubernetes products. These days the end users are the ones consuming Helm, and purposely reaching out to them is a different strategy.
We’re looking forward to sharing our findings in the future.
Support the Team
The team purposely tasked themselves to do this by holding regular meetings, with an eye on the calendar and events, and worked through our items with a purpose and bias for action. We set aside the time we had, and worked to get through them.
Call to Action
And lastly, the Call to Action, the team heads into 2025 with new energy, and we are hoping you come join us.