A year ago, we introduced Helm 3, a major evolution in Helm's development. And we announced at that time that Helm 2 would receive patches and security updates for a year.
Here we are, one year later. Friday the 13th, 2020 seems like a fitting day to end support for a major version. And today, we are announcing the official end of support for Helm 2. The charts repository is also now read-only, with no further changes.
Helm recently adopted a release schedule for minor and patch releases. Today, the second Wednesday in November 2020, marks the first release under the new schedule. This release schedule provides predictability to those who use Helm, contribute to Helm, and maintain Helm.
Back in 2019, when the Helm v2 support timeline and end of life plan was announced, the deprecation of the helm/charts GitHub repository was announced, as well. The primary reason for the deprecation is the significant increase in upkeep for the repo maintainers. Over the last couple of years the number of charts under maintenance increased from ~100 to 300+ causing a commensurate increase in pull requests and updates to the repo. Unfortunately, despite many efforts to automate review and maintenance tasks, the amount of time available from maintainers has not increased.
As previously announced, the stable and incubator repositories have moved to a new location. This post will update you on the new locations and provide directions to start using them.
Important Note: This does not affect the obsolescence timeline for the stable and incubator repositories that was announced in 2019. On November 13, 2020 the stable and incubator charts repository will reach the end of development and become archives. You can find that many of the charts have moved to other, community managed, repositories. You can discover these on the Artifact Hub. More information on the obsolescence will follow in future blog posts and communications.
Five years ago, in a hackathon at Deis (who has since been acquired by Microsoft) Helm was born.
Today, we are happy to announce that the Helm Hub is moving to the Artifact Hub. That means, when you go to the Helm Hub you will be redirected to the Artifact Hub.
with a nod to Lewis Carroll...
“The time has come,” the maintainers said,
“To talk of software fates:
Of upgrades -- and shipping Helm v3 --
Of bugfixes -- and k8s --”
Helm v3 was released in November 2019, the result of ongoing community effort to evolve Helm to meet the community’s needs. With a streamlined client-only experience, a renewed focus on security, and tighter integration with Kubernetes APIs, Helm v3 continues to provide production-tested package management for Kubernetes. And as a graduated CNCF project, Helm is a key part of the cloud native ecosystem.
Today we are happy to see Helm reach the final stage of the CNCF ladder. Helm has moved from the incubating level to the graduated level as a CNCF project, alongside Kubernetes and other select projects.
As our world comes together to fight the global pandemic, the Helm maintainers want to ensure that we're doing our part to help you maintain your critical systems while they are operating at peak demand in a time where normal development and operation schedules have had to be adjusted.
Next week is the annual KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in North America. The Helm project and maintainers have several things going on and we wanted to invite you to them.