The History of the Project

Helm 3 is a CNCF project in the final stages of incubation.

Helm began as what is now known as Helm Classic, a Deis project begun in 2015 and introduced at the innaugural KubeCon.

In January of 2016, the project merged with a GCS tool called Kubernetes Deployment Manager, and the project was moved under Kubernetes. As a result of the merging of codebases, Helm 2.0 was released later that year. The key feature of Deployment Manager that survived in Helm 2 was the server-side component, renamed from DM to Tiller for the final Helm 2.0 release.

Helm was promoted from a Kubernetes subproject to a full-fledged CNCF project in June, 2018. Helm formed a top-level governing body and several projects were subsumed under the Helm project, including Monocular, the Helm Chart Repo, Chart Museum, and later the Helm Hub.

When the Helm 3 development cycle began, Tiller was removed, bringing Helm closer to its original vision of being a client tool. But Helm 3 continues to track releases inside of the Kubernetes cluster, making it possible for teams to work together on a common set of Helm releases.

Helm 3 was released in November 2019.