Helm is “the package manager for Kubernetes.” Its own site frames it as “the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes,” doing for a Kubernetes cluster roughly what apt or npm do for an operating system: turning a sprawl of hand-edited configuration into installable, upgradeable packages.
The unit of packaging is the chart. A Helm chart bundles all the Kubernetes resources an application needs, with templated values so the same chart can be configured for different environments. As the project puts it, “Charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application,” and they are “easy to create, version, share, and publish - so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste.”
Because charts are versioned and shareable, Helm gives teams a single source of truth for how an application is deployed, and a repeatable path to install it, roll it forward, or roll it back. This addresses a real pain point of raw Kubernetes, where deploying a non-trivial application can otherwise mean applying many separate, manually maintained YAML manifests.
Helm originated in 2015 and later became a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the same foundation that stewards Kubernetes itself.