Another project has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, after members voted to include Helm at the incubation stage within the organization’s roster of open-source projects.
Helm was originally developed at Google and Deis, which was acquired by Microsoft last year. It is designed to help users of the Kubernetes container-orchestration project (also under the CNCF’s wing) find packages that facilitate the deployment of apps on Kubernetes.
After it became clear last year that Kubernetes had evolved into a de-facto standard for container orchestration and deployment, the project’s leaders decided it was time to consolidate the core of Kubernetes, making it smaller and carving off projects that didn’t necessarily need to be part of the core base for further development. Helm was previously maintained under the Kubernetes project, but now that it has been granted incubation status as a solo project, it will have access to greater development and marketing resources from CNCF members.
Solid usage numbers are hard to come by in this world, but 64 percent of respondents to a Kubernetes survey last year said they were using Helm to manage the process of deploying Kubernetes apps. Around 330 people are contributing to the project, and that number should grow with the backing of the CNCF.