The first time I was tasked with maintaining a production server, I relied on a checklist my predecessor had left for me. The checklist contained all the maintenance steps along with their corresponding commands. In those early days, I religiously copied each command, double- and triple-checking each character before pressing the Enter key. Slowly but surely, the commands got committed to memory until one day I realized I did not need the checklist.

Package repositories were never something I thought about as a developer unless something didn’t work. For example, if it was slow, wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t install, or was overly complicated to configure. Mostly I wanted something I barely noticed. Something simple and easy to use.

Is your Helm chart promotion process complicated and difficult to automate? Are rapidly increasing Helm chart versions making your head spin? Do you wish you had a way to quickly and easily see the differences between deployments across all of your environments? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then read on! My purpose for writing this article is to share a few of the techniques that I’ve seen make the biggest impact for Codefresh and our customers.