Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

Maybe this will finally break me of my habit of using helm charts, period.

I’ve never used Helm charts. I learned K8S in a shop in which kustomize is the standard and helm is a permitted exception to the standard, but I just never felt any reason to learn helm. Am I missing out?

Sometimes the limitations of kustomize annoy me, but we find ways to live with them

Some people like that Helm:

- Makes it possible to go from zero to fully running k8s integrated components in 5 seconds by just running 'helm install --repo https://example.com/charts/ mynginx nginx' (very useful: https://artifacthub.io/)

- Gives the ability to transactionally apply k8s configs, and un-apply them if there is a failure along the way (atomic rollbacks)

- Stores copies/versions/etc of each installation in the server so you have metadata for troubleshooting/operations/etc without having to keep it in some external system in a custom way.

- Allows a user who doesn't know anything about K8s to provide some simple variables to customize the installation of a bunch of K8s resources.

- Is composeable, has templates, etc.

So basically Helm has a lot of features, while Kustomize has... one. Very different purposes I think. You can also use both at the same time.

Personally I think Helm's atomic deployment feature is well worth it. I also love how easy it is to install charts. It feels a bit like magic.

> zero to fully running (...) in 5 seconds by just running helm install

Realistically, a plain helm install without any values rarely if ever gives you the deployment you need, so you have to study the chart anyways.

> rollback on failure

This is hardly unique to helm.

> history metadata without (...) some external system

In 2025 you should probably be using gitops anyways, in which case the git repo is your history.