Most developers working with Kubernetes use Helm, an open-source tool created during a hackathon nine years ago. However, with the rapid growth of Kubernetes packages to over 800 packages on the CNCF landscape today, the prerequisites have changed, and we believe it’s time for a new package manager. Every engineer we talked to has a love-hate relationship with Helm, and we also found ourselves defaulting to Helm despite its shortcomings due to a lack of alternatives.

We have spent enough time trying to get Helm to do what we need. From looking for the correct chart, trying to learn how each value affects the components and hand-crafting a schemaless values.yaml file, to debugging the final release if it inevitably fails to install, the experience of using Helm is, for the most part, time consuming and cumbersome.

Charts often become more complex, requiring the use of sub-charts. These umbrella charts tend to be even harder to maintain and upgrade, because so many different components are bundled into a single release.

We talked to over 100 developers and found that everyone developed their own little workarounds, with some working better than others. We collected the feedback poured everything we learned from that into a new package manager. We want to build something that is as easy to use as Homebrew or npm and make package management on Kubernetes as easy as on every other platform.

Some of the features Glasskube already supports are

Typesafe package configuration via UI or interactive CLI to inject values from other packages, ConfigMaps, and Secrets.

Browse our central package repository so there is no need to look for a Helm repository to find a specific package.

All packages are dependency-aware so they can be used and referenced by multiple other packages even across namespaces. We validate the complete dependency tree - So packages get installed in the correct namespace.

Preview and perform pending updates to your desired version with a single click of a button. All updates have been tested in the Glasskube test suite before being available in the public repository.

Use multiple repositories and publish your own private packages (e.g., your company's internal services packages, so all developers will have the up-to-date and easily configured internal services).

All features are available via UI or interactive CLI. You can also manage all packages via GitOps.

Currently, we are focused on enhancing the user experience, aiming to save engineers as much time as possible. We are still using Helm and Manifests under the hood. However, together with the community, we plan to develop an entirely new packaging and bundling format for all cloud-native packages. This will provide package developers with a straightforward way to define how to install and configure packages, offer simple upgrade paths, and enable us to provide feedback, crash reports, and analytics to every developer working on Kubernetes packages.

We also started working on a cloud version. You can pre-signup here in case you are interested: https://glasskube.cloud

We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have and hope you get the chance to try out Glasskube.