We regularly get questions from people who want tools or methods to manage their Helm releases in an environment. This post provides some insight and direction to help people get started.

With the release of Helm 3.8.0, Helm is able to store and work with charts in container registries, as an alternative to Helm repositories. This feature, which used to be an experimental feature, is now generally available.

The Helm organization is thrilled to introduce Karen Chu as the latest member of the Helm org maintainers. She will be the ninth committee member. Karen has been active in the Helm ecosystem since day one when Rimas, Jack, and I first started the project. She was instrumental in Helm's early branding, organized both of the Helm Summits, and leads Helm's community management team. You may also know her from her Helm-adjacent work as the co-creator of the Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes series or her role as a CNCF ambassador.

Meet Helm's newest org maintainer: Martin Hickey. Martin has been a longtime Helm project maintainer. He was instrumental in the development of Helm 3, and has been one of the most active maintainers on the project. He is also one of the creators of the Helm 2-to-3 migration plugin.

This week, the Helm maintainers voted to elect Martin onto the Helm Org Maintainers board. In this new role, Martin will help shape not just Helm, but the many projects that are hosted together with Helm. As a first order of business, Martin will be migrating the Map KubeAPIs plugin to the Helm organization.

Helm has now completed a second security audit, funded by the CNCF. The first audit focused on the source code for the Helm client along with the process Helm uses to handle security. The second audit, performed by Trail of Bits, looked at the source code for the Helm client along with a threat model for the use of Helm.

A year ago, we introduced Helm 3, a major evolution in Helm's development. And we announced at that time that Helm 2 would receive patches and security updates for a year.

Here we are, one year later. Friday the 13th, 2020 seems like a fitting day to end support for a major version. And today, we are announcing the official end of support for Helm 2. The charts repository is also now read-only, with no further changes.

Helm recently adopted a release schedule for minor and patch releases. Today, the second Wednesday in November 2020, marks the first release under the new schedule. This release schedule provides predictability to those who use Helm, contribute to Helm, and maintain Helm.

Back in 2019, when the Helm v2 support timeline and end of life plan was announced, the deprecation of the helm/charts GitHub repository was announced, as well. The primary reason for the deprecation is the significant increase in upkeep for the repo maintainers. Over the last couple of years the number of charts under maintainance increased from ~100 to 300+ causing a commensurate increase in pull requests and updates to the repo. Unfortunately, despite many efforts to automate review and maintenance tasks, the amount of time available from maintainers has not increased.

As previously announced, the stable and incubator repositories have moved to a new location. This post will update you on the new locations and provide directions to start using them.

Important Note: This does not affect the obsolescence timeline for the stable and incubator repositories that was announced in 2019. On November 13, 2020 the stable and incubator charts repository will reach the end of development and become archives. You can find that many of the charts have moved to other, community managed, repositories. You can discover these on the Artifact Hub. More information on the obsolescence will follow in future blog posts and communications.

The new location for the stable repository is https://charts.helm.sh/stable and the new location for the incubator repository is https://charts.helm.sh/incubator. If you use charts in either of these old locations below you MUST update the repositories you use before November 13, 2020. The new locations are hosted using GitHub pages.

Along with the new locations, Helm v2.17.0 and v3.4.0 have been released to help you use the new location. You are encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions.

Five years ago, in a hackathon at Deis (who has since been acquired by Microsoft) Helm was born.