Our latest open-source project, Helm-Dashboard, just crossed 3K stars on GitHub (and hundreds of daily active users), only three months since it was released!
We thought this milestone was a good chance to take a look back at our journey, announce the release of v. 1.0.0, discuss future plans, and, most importantly, give our utmost thanks to the amazing contributors and Kommunity members that made it all possible!
What capabilities would you like to see next in Helm-Dashbaord? Let us know here.
Where We Started Where We Are Now – Releasing v. 1.0.0
The motivation to build a GUI for Helm came from my firsthand experience navigating through Helm charts using CLI. I found it pretty hard to answer simple questions like When was the last upgrade rolled out? How long did a revision exist before being upgraded? Were there any issues in the recent rollouts?
The need for visualization and streamlined operations is real! We felt like the ecosystem is missing a simple, yet holistic, tool dedicated to simplifying change intelligence and troubleshooting.
Today, I’m excited to share the public release of v. 1.0.0 following the hard work of our own Andrei Pokihlko, Rona Hirsch, Udi Hofesh, and many other members of the community.
This marks a milestone in the maturity of the project as now it’s more stable and robust, and has been used and vetted by thousands of community members around the world.
Some of the cool new features you can expect to see in the new version:
- Auto-update repositories when installed into cluster
- The ability to reconfigure charts without access to their source
- Specifying multiple working namespaces
- Self-sufficient binary, no helm/kubectl requirement
- REST API documented
As always, we welcome everyone to provide feedback and suggestions on the project’s roadmap on our social channels, GitHub, or the Slack Kommunity. We’ve even created a user survey form to make it easier on you 🙂
The Community Loves Helm-Dashboard
I knew I wasn’t the only one struggling with the Helm CLI, but I must admit that I was blown away by the amount of love and support that we’ve received from the community. It’s one thing to build a popular Helm plugin, but with 1K GitHub stars in the first week and 3K stars after three months, we’ve even surpassed the trajectory of the original Helm project!
Vanity metrics aside, we’ve also accumulated:
- 200 PRs
- 89 issues
- 15 Awesome contributors!
Shout out to our contributors: hdm23061993, OmAximani0, dhiemaz, toddtee, Niravprajapati1, siddhikhapare,arvindsundararajan98, iiTidgex, dploeger, JinxCappa, ChristfriedBalizou, denganliang, Bhargav-InfraCloud, Wyfy0107, and liornoy
The positive feedback came from both novice and pro-Helm users, community members, and tech leaders alike.
We’d also like to thank our friends and partners from the community: David Flanagan, Saiyam Pathak, Kunal Kushwaha, Anais Ulrichs, and Eddie Jaoude.
What’s Next?
The journey doesn’t end here. We have big plans for the future of Helm-Dashboard and we invite you all to take part.
Here are some of the main capabilities and improvements we have in store:
- UI makeover – Helm-Dashboard looks nice. We want to make it BEAUTIFUL!
- Make it easier to detect misconfigurations, unhealthy resources in charts, deprecated charts and suggest new revisions.
- Analytics on deploy metrics
- Notifications on revision created or charted installed,
- Integration with Komodor’s Kubernetes Platform
Helm-Dashboard Loves the Community
We don’t just want to improve the product itself. We also want to improve and deepen our engagement with the open-source community.
We already have a bustling Slack Kommunity where most of the conversations around Helm-Dashboard are taking place. And as I’ve mentioned earlier we’ve created a survey to help you steer the project roadmap to the features you want to see most.
Lastly, we’ve decided to host a monthly user group meeting where we can all get together to discuss Helm-Dashboard, share feedback, talk about future releases, and geek out over K8s. The very first meeting will take place virtually in two weeks and you can RSVP here.
See you soon!
