Helm

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes and despite its critics (mostly complaining about its templating language), remains the standard way to distribute and configure Kubernetes applications. The practical reason: the Helm Hub contains charts for virtually every application you'll ever want to deploy on Kubernetes — Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch, cert-manager, ingress-nginx. Understanding Helm means understanding three things: chart structure (templates + values), the release lifecycle (install/upgrade/rollback), and values override patterns. The nuanced take: Helm is best for consuming third-party charts. For your own applications, kustomize (or just plain manifests with ArgoCD) often produces more maintainable results.