Posts

TL;DR Helm only renders manifests. The real question is how they land on the cluster and stay there. CI helm upgrade and the Terraform provider push once and walk away. Only ArgoCD has a loop that catches drift. Terraform builds the cluster and its foundations, ArgoCD ships the apps, raw helm stays for debugging. Most teams deploy Helm charts the way they did on day one, and never revisit it until it hurts. The pipeline that ran helm upgrade --install against staging two years ago is still shipping production today. Nobody questions it because it works. Right up until it doesn’t. ...

The community MLflow chart is great for a demo and useless for production. It knows nothing about your Key Vault, your Workload Identity, your Traefik ingress, or your certs. Here is the layered Helm pattern I run instead, where the open source chart stays untouched and your cloud specifics live in a thin layer on top. Plus the one missing package that breaks Workload Identity on day one.

Azure AI Foundry is amazing until you have to manage it for more than one team. Here is how LiteLLM became the gateway that fixed my key sprawl, capped everyone’s spend, and turned key rotation from a fire drill into a thirty second job.