Microsoft has issued an urgent warning to users of the Helm chart manager for Kubernetes, as version 2 is losing support within days while some users still refuse to jump ship.
As DevClass readers will know, charts are packaged Kubernetes apps, configured for manageable deployment.
In a recent tweet, Sean McKenna, lead product manager for Azure Kubernetes Service, said “ICYMI, @HelmPack v2 is reaching end of life on November 13, at which time all development will stop (including security patching) and things will start breaking. We still see v2 usage in #AKS so please prioritize your migration to v3 ASAP.”
DevClass contacted Microsoft to ask how bad things were and what users should do. Bridget Kromhout, Principal Program Manager for the Kubernetes ecosystems, said “When we released Helm v3 in November 2019, November 2020 seemed far away, but now we’re finishing all the details for the transition off Helm v2 being supported; support for Helm v2 officially ends on Friday November 13th, 2020”.
She added that to celebrate Helm’s fifth birthday, GitHub was now hosting archival charts.
Those remaining on version two of Helm won’t find their system stops working, Kromhout said, but should prepare for transition as soon as possible.
“There are many details, but at a minimum they need to make sure they can still launch applications and download charts. If you aren’t ready to move to Helm v3 quite yet, upgrade to Helm 2.17.0 immediately to avoid availability problems and then plan your migration. Helm v2 will
no longer receive bug-fixes and security patches.”
“Helm is currently up to 3.4.0 [which] shows many improvements from v2, and the clearest wins are enterprise-grade security paired with increased simplicity and flexibility,” Kromhout told DevClass, noting that Helm was now a graduated CNCF project.