None of that seems like a reasonable complaint about Helm itself, unless Helm makes it easy to write poor charts and never document them. When faced with shitty code with shitty docs, maybe the thing to do is to send a PR and make it better. At least a ticket.
When 99% of all charts have this problem, maybe the problem isn’t with the individual charts, rather a symptom of a fundamentally dissonant abstraction model. The core problem is that it’s overkill. The solution to that is not to add or fix, the solution is to remove.
Why would I need a chart for a single container app? Making this simple is what Kubernetes is designed for. No, I don’t want your ServiceAccounts or PVs because I anyway need to grant and understand the permissions and select the size and SKU of the underlying disk.
Deploying an app in your own infrastructure has too many knobs that need to be turned so you need to expose all of them. Just spend a few minutes extra to write your own deployment manifest. While it’s a few more lines of code vs ”helm install”, you will not regret it and you’ll get a much better understanding of what’s actually running.
Now there are of course exceptions to this, like Prometheus or Ingress operators where more complex charts are warranted. What I’m talking about is those charts that just wrap what can be translated from docker-compose to k8s in two minutes.
