Helm — originally a hackathon project called Kate’s Place — turned 10 in 2025, marking the milestone with the release of Helm 4, its first major update in six years. Created by Matt Butcher and colleagues as a playful take on “K8s,” the early project won a small prize but quickly grew into a serious effort when Deus leadership recognized the need for a Kubernetes package manager. Renamed Helm, it rapidly expanded with community contributors and became one of the first CNCF graduating projects.

Helm 4 reflects years of accumulated design debt and evolving use cases. After the rapid iterations of Helm 1, 2, and 3, the latest version modernizes logging, improves dependency management, and introduces WebAssembly-based plugins for cross-platform portability—addressing the growing diversity of operating systems and architectures. Beyond headline features, maintainers emphasize that mature projects increasingly deliver “boring” but essential improvements, such as better logging, which simplify workflows and integrate more cleanly with other tools. Helm’s re-architected internals also lay the foundation for new chart and package capabilities in upcoming 4.x releases.

 

Learn more from The New Stack about Helm: 

The Super Helm Chart: To Deploy or Not To Deploy?

Kubernetes Gets a New Resource Orchestrator in the Form of Kro

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