A group of Habitat core team members is at Helm Summit in beautiful (but surprisingly frosty) Portland this week, to learn more about how Helm contributors are continuing to automate application deployment and management to Kubernetes clusters.
This week we also released our new Habitat and Helm exporter and we are excited to share this with the Helm community. Check it out in this blog on the Habitat.sh project site and let us know how it works for you!
Helm is an open source package manager for Kubernetes that is maintained by the CNCF. It allows you to define, install, and upgrade even very complex Kubernetes applications — and you can run multiple versions of the same service within the cluster, which is very helpful when you’re managing different releases.
Habitat allows you to automate how you build your application, so that you explicitly declare build and runtime dependencies, and then create a Habitat artifact that only includes your code and its runtime dependencies. Once it’s deployed, your artifact is also built with application lifecycle hooks that tell it how to behave. Habitat will rebuild your application as your update your application’s code in your source control tool of choice, or if an underlying dependency has a new version.
Habitat also has exporters, which run after you build your application, and export your application to various formats so you can run the exact same application, bundled with its runtime behavior, in many different environments.
As of Habitat’s 0.54.0 release, you can use Habitat with the Habitat Operator for Kubernetes (which is now at 0.5.0 and allows you to automate how you manage your applications on your Kubernetes cluster with Habitat) and export your application to run in Helm charts. Check it out, let us know how it goes, and Happy Helming!