Helmless Architecture¶

In a nutshell, Helmless is a workflow for templating a custom Helm chart into the cloud provider's specific configuration, and then deploying it using the cloud provider's CLI.

Simple but very powerful and adoptable to every cloud provider and CI/CD platform.

graph LR
    A[values.yaml] --> B[CI/CD Pipeline]
    subgraph B[CI/CD Pipeline]
        direction LR
        B1[Template
        Helmless Chart] --> B2[Deploy using
        Cloud Provider CLI]
    end
    B --> D[Serverless
    Container]

Google Cloud Run¶

Helmless has been battle tested internally using Google Cloud Run and serves hundreds of containers and production deployments every day. That's why the documentation focuses on Google Cloud Run and it currently is the only platform supported out of the box.

Google Cloud Run is a fully managed container platform that allows you to deploy and scale your containers in a serverless way. Under the hood it uses the Knative to provide it's serverless platform. In the Google Cloud Run documentation you can find the full YAML specification that is templated by our Google Cloud Run Helmless chart.

Extending to other platforms¶

Other cloud providers offer their own serverless platforms, like AWS ECS, AWS Fargate, Azure Container Apps, etc. which all support their own YAML specifications.

AWS for example offers to use AWS CloudFormation to template your infrastructure as code. By creating a custom Helmless chart that renders into the AWS CloudFormation YAML specification, you can easily deploy your container to AWS as well.