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Adopting Helmless

Adopting something new is always a challenge, but we've put together some tips to help you get started.

General advice

The following guide is scoped to Helmless, but the same principles apply to any platform initiative. See your platform as a product and your platform team as a startup within your organization.

Be user-centric and focus on the value you can deliver by solving real problems for the users of your platform.

Convince your team

Before you can start adopting Helmless, you need to convince your team that it's a good idea and brings value to both the team and organization.

Ask the following questions together with your team:

  • How do you currently deploy your applications?
  • What problems do you have with the current deployment process?
  • How would Helmless solve those problems?
  • Do you use Terraform to manage those application deployments and is it painful?
  • Why is it painful?
  • Do you already have a Kubernetes cluster?
  • If yes, are there reasons why you don't use Kubernetes for your applications?
  • Do you already use Google Cloud Run?

Use these questions to guide the conversation in your team and involve the users of your platform to help you understand the current state and the pain points.

Set up succes metrics

Consider setting up one or more succes metrics before you start adopting Helmless. This way you can measure the before and after of adopting Helmless. This helps to convince the team and organization that adopting Helmless is time well spent.

The DORA metrics are a good starting point, especially:

  • Deployment frequency (how often you deploy)
  • Change lead time (time from code commit to production)

You should try to measure those per application, even for the Terraform deployments before you start adopting Helmless.

Start small

Start by deploying a new application using Helmless to get a feel for it. Then migrate one of your internal platform services to Helmless. This will help you dogfood Helmless within your team and show the value it can bring.

Once you have worked out and seen the value of Helmless, put together a short demo for your users and stakeholders. Make it flashy and make the current problem really obvious. Show the pain. And then show how Helmless can solve those problems.

Optionally create some artifical scarcity and ask for teams to file an application for the beta program to adopt Helmless in their team. This way you will get the willing early adopters and can organically grow the user base and acceptance in your organization.

Rollout

Once you have onboarded a few teams, you will have the first metrics to show the value of Helmless. Get some testimonials from the early adopters and start rolling out Helmless to the rest of the organization.

Do some marketing and create some hype, so that 80% of the teams want to use and adopt Helmless. Provide an easy self-service migration path and assist them with the migration.

Then run after the remaining 20% of teams and you are done 🥳.

Party 🎉

You did it! You are now a Helmless organization! 🎉

If you have any questions or need help, please join our Community Forum and ask away!