I don’t mean for this to sound condescending or dismissive, BUT if you don’t think Helm is primarily a package manager you haven’t worked with infrastructure deployed in k8s much.
I’ve been doing this for about 8 years and have seen a few hundred clusters at dozens of orgs, been using GitOps for the last 4ish years.
Invariably they all involved using helm as a package manager to deploy off the shelf infrastructure with minor adjustments. I still don’t see your point, we can just agree to disagree.
I'm happy to discuss this topic and to clarify it.
For me the 'package manager' aspects are more than the templating and having a zip file. For me it is more what apt etc. do
So using helm and its remote repositories, using the helm cli etc.
But we use kubeapps or ArgoCD to install the helm packages and download all helm charts before we deploy them (due to security requirements).
We leverage 100% IaC. Therefore we bootstrap ArgoCD and than install everything through ArgoCD. Only helm charts for our customers/collegues are installed through kubeapps.
I don’t doubt your experience and what you do at your org, yeah that falls into a bit of a different category since you use kubeapps.
I guess what I’m saying is: in my experience across many organizations, helm is indeed treated more like a package manager (like I described above). Your workplace seems to be in the minority.
