Three ways to deploy Helm charts on Kubernetes, and when each one breaks
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 a staging cluster two years ago is still the thing shipping production today, and nobody questions it because it works. Right up until it doesn’t. The part nobody frames clearly is that Helm itself is just templating. It takes values and a chart and renders Kubernetes manifests. That rendering step is identical no matter what you do. The real question is how the rendered output lands on the cluster and how it stays there. There are three answers I have run in production, and each one is correct in a specific place and a liability everywhere else. ...