The landscape of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Kubernetes packages have dramatically increased, welcome news for the over 7 million developers who utilize Kubernetes. However, while the open-source tool Helm has emerged as the popular choice, it fails to satisfy the growing demand due to complex workflows and scattered solutions.
Helm has been the only choice for packaging and distributing Kubernetes for the past five years, despite its shortcomings. During utilization of Helm in other cloud-native projects, similar issues persisted, prompting researchers to develop a new solution called Glasskube.
Glasskube is an open-source package management tool for Kubernetes. It surpasses both Helm and Kustomize in terms of speed, making the process of installation, updates, and configuration of packages on Kubernetes twenty times faster. With this tool, the ambition is to develop enterprise-grade infrastructure software to operate essential workloads across more than 3 million Kubernetes clusters worldwide. Glasskube’s approach is inspired by the simplicity of Homebrew and npm.
Glasskube allows the Kubernetes cluster to resonate with Homebrew and npm. It simplifies package management by cutting down the complexity of installation, updates, and configuration. With Glasskube, hunting for a Helm repository becomes obsolete as all packages are readily available in the Glasskube UI, facilitating their installation into a cluster.
Users can review and execute pending upgrades to their chosen version with a simple click or a command in the command line. Glasskube ensures all updates are scrutinized by its test suite before going live. Packages can be set up to accept typesafe input values via the user interface or a dynamic command line interface, enabling easy injection of values from ConfigMaps, Secrets, and other packages. Values no longer remain undocumented and untyped in the YAML format.
Glasskube promotes seamless integration with GitOps due to its packages being custom resources. The project, licensed under Apache-2.0, comfortably fits into existing GitOps processes and supports integration with Renovate, adding resource-level differences to the pull request automatically.
Thus, Glasskube offers a modern, smooth process of deploying Kubernetes. Its efficient dependency management, secure update procedures, and support for multiple repositories allow for safe, reliable, and versatile deployments. Additionally, the process of setting up Kubernetes packages is twenty times faster with Glasskube as compared to Helm.
In conclusion, Glasskube provides a faster, efficient alternative to Helm, easing developers’ tasks in managing Kubernetes packages and integrations.
