Hi, I hope you're doing well! I've been following Pulumi’s development over the time, and I’m particularly interested in the Pulumi KubernetesX project. Initially, it seemed like KubernetesX had the potential to evolve as a replacement for Helm, offering more programmatic control and flexibility. However, it doesn't seem to have gained significant traction or continued development in that direction. Could you provide some insights into why KubernetesX didn’t evolve further as a Helm alternative? Were there particular challenges or user adoption factors that influenced this decision?

I don't have the full historical context, but I'll take a stab at answering. I think KubernetesX was developed to offer a more powerful/flexible abstraction than helm. However, helm has a lot more charts available whereas not many folks wrote higher level components on top of kubernetesX for distribution. (In part, this may have been a result of it being more work to distribute pulumi components.) Since then, pulumi has just moved to support deploying helm charts, so you can get the benefits of the helm ecosystem with the power of the pulumi engine. This approach has seen a lot of adoption, so we've not moved to invest further in KubernetesX.

Thanks for getting back to me! I totally get why Helm is popular, but honestly, I’ve found its templating language can be pretty frustrating—dealing with untyped values and inconsistent structures can quickly get messy as things grow. It feels more fragile than flexible at times. That’s where I see Pulumi having a real opportunity. Using actual programming languages with type safety makes everything so much more predictable and easier to maintain. I think a library as KubernetesX could really help people avoid the headaches that come with Helm’s templating. As a wild thought, I wonder if it’s possible to wrap Pulumi code into a Helm chart—maybe using Helm+tools for deployment while letting Pulumi handle infrastructure as code behind the scenes. Not sure how practical that would be, but just an idea!

Yep totally agree. We see a lot of users happily using helm charts someone else wrote, but not a lot of people extolling the fun of writing them! You absolutely can use our kubernetes provider today to create reusable components rather than writing a helm chart. If there's specific things that are holding you back form doing that, let us know!