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Introduction to Kubernetes Helm
Develop production-ready Helm charts in 3 days: From installation through OCI registry publishing to GitOps integration. You create custom charts, test with helm-unittest, and deploy multi-environment setups. All exercises run on dedicated Kubernetes clusters in the DevNinjas Dojo.
- Workshop levelIntermediate
- Satisfied participants2340+
- Days3
- LanguageGerman & English
- Workshop codeDW9
Workshop Details
What makes this workshop stand out
What you will learn and take away
After three days of Helm training, you will manage Kubernetes deployments production-ready. Here is what you take home:
- Develop custom charts with Go templates, values.yaml, and subcharts
- Use OCI registries (Docker Hub, GHCR) instead of traditional Helm repos
- GitOps integration with ArgoCD for declarative deployments
- Security best practices: RBAC, secrets management with Sealed Secrets and External Secrets Operator
All exercises run in dedicated Kubernetes clusters in the DevNinjas Dojo. No local setup, no hassle. You take working code home with you.
Want to continue? Our Kubernetes Advanced training (DW3) deepens production readiness, or prepare for certification with CKA (DW6).
Why the investment pays off
Helm standardizes your Kubernetes deployments and makes them repeatable. Concrete benefits for your team:
- Faster deployments: Roll out a complete staging environment with a single command instead of maintaining every YAML file by hand
- Fewer errors: 40% of Kubernetes teams discover misconfigurations in their environments (Red Hat, 2024). Standardized Helm charts eliminate the most common cause: manual copy-paste between environments.
- Lower costs: Reusable charts and automated rollbacks save your team recurring manual YAML work in every deployment cycle
- ROI example (illustrative calculation): assuming a DevOps salary of EUR 80k/year (≈ EUR 400/day), the training pays for itself after 4 saved workdays
Investing in Helm knowledge pays off immediately through measurably faster deployments and reduced operational costs.
Prerequisites
Required:
- Kubernetes fundamentals: Understanding of Pods, Deployments, Services, Namespaces
- Experience with kubectl and YAML syntax
- Comfortable working in the terminal
Not required:
- Prior Helm experience (you learn from scratch)
- Programming skills (templates are explained step by step)
Recommended: Our Kubernetes Fundamentals Workshop (DW2) provides ideal preparation.
Workshop Agenda
Your Agenda at a Glance
Hands-on and structured. Every participant works in their own cloud environment. The agenda shows you what to expect each day.
Day 1: Helm fundamentals and installing your first charts
5 topics09:00–09:30💬 Introduction Round
You learn why YAML templating with Helm scales better than copy-paste or Kustomize overlays: Reusable charts for 10+ microservices, centralized dependency management, automatic rollbacks on failures.
Concrete problems Helm solves: Deploy PostgreSQL with 1 command instead of writing 300 lines of YAML. Manage Dev/Stage/Prod with values overrides instead of 3 duplicated YAML sets. Deployment history with helm rollback instead of manual backups.
Get familiar with the core elements of the Helm CLI and understand the differences between Helm 3 and Helm 4 (WASM plugins, OCI digest support, Server-Side Apply for GitOps). Discover how charts, repositories, and releases interconnect to streamline your Kubernetes deployments.
Note: Tiller (Helm 2) was removed in Helm 3 and is only mentioned as historical context.
12:00–13:00🥪 Lunch Break
You install Helm 4 and test its key features using a sample chart. You understand what changed compared to Helm 3 and which charts from Helm 3 projects continue to work without modification.
Helm 4 highlights: Server-Side Apply for GitOps, OCI-first for container registry integration, WASM plugins, improved caching strategy.
You learn to find and evaluate charts on Artifact Hub. Using helm search hub, helm show chart, and helm show values, you analyze charts before installing them.
Practical focus: Choosing charts without vendor lock-in (e.g. Traefik Ingress, Grafana, cert-manager). We discuss why most Bitnami charts became paid in 2025 and which community alternatives are better suited.
Explore the structure of Helm charts: from Chart.yaml and values.yaml to templates. Learn how to customize standard values and deploy a hands-on exercise using a simple web server chart: adjust ports and replicas, and test it in your environment.
15:30–16:30💭 Questions & Answers
Day 2: Develop and version your own Helm charts
6 topics09:00–09:30💭 Questions & Answers
Existing charts not enough? You create custom charts for your specific requirements with helm create. Learn which structure works best and why clean separation of templates and values is crucial. This sets the stage for scalable and easily maintainable deployments.
Dive deeper into Go templates: learn how to use if/else and range for dynamic deployments, leverage built-in functions, and streamline pipelines. With these skills, you'll create adaptable and resilient Kubernetes configurations.
12:00–13:00🥪 Lunch Break
Get acquainted with subcharts and dependencies to build complex applications in a modular way. You learn the umbrella chart pattern: Combining multiple microservices as one deployment unit, managing global configurations (e.g. image registry, ingress rules) centrally.
Plus: Chart hooks for pre-/post-install jobs and conditional deployments
for feature toggles. Hands-on example: Web app + API + PostgreSQL
as umbrella chart with global.registry.
Keep track of your chart versions at all times with SemVer and tagging. Learn how to use OCI registries (Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, Azure ACR, AWS ECR) as the modern standard for Helm charts, with the same workflows as for container images.
Alternative: Traditional Helm repositories (S3, GitLab, GitHub Pages) are briefly introduced as legacy options.
You write unit tests for Helm templates using the helm-unittest plugin. BDD-style tests in YAML validate that your templates render correctly with different values. You test conditional logic, default values, and required fields.
Hands-on: Test suite for your own chart with helm unittest.
This ensures refactorings don't break features.
Solidify your knowledge in a collaborative practical session: we'll build a chart for a simple web application with a database, integrating subcharts and hooks. Get ready to apply Helm to real-world scenarios with confidence.
16:30–16:30💭 Questions & Answers
Day 3: Testing, multi-environment deployments, and best practices
6 topics09:00–09:30💭 Questions & Answers
Elevate the quality of your charts using helm lint and helm test. Discover how unit tests for templates work and how to automate value validation, minimizing downtime in production environments.
Learn how to use multiple values files for staging and production and which Helm patterns work best for multi-environment setups.
You learn how to integrate external secrets management tools into Helm charts: Sealed Secrets for encrypted secrets in Git, External Secrets Operator for Vault/AWS Secrets Manager, SOPS for encrypted values files. Focus is on Helm templates and chart structure, not tool configuration.
12:00–13:00🥪 Lunch Break
You learn systematic Helm debugging with the essential diagnostic commands:
- helm diff: preview upgrade changes
- helm get manifest: inspect the deployed state
- helm template --debug: find template errors
- kubectl describe and kubectl get events: analyze failed deployments
Hands-on: Failed release recovery. Fix stuck releases with helm rollback and --force. Resolve production incidents quickly.
Production without security is risky. You learn Helm's security aspects: RBAC configurations for access control, chart scanning for vulnerabilities, chart signing for trust, and repository access control. We introduce proven governance processes so you maintain complete control over your Helm deployments.
Discover how standardized chart structures can simplify team workflows and how to maintain Helm charts over the long term. Benefit from tested rollback strategies and keep large-scale Kubernetes ecosystems organized.
Discover how Helm and ArgoCD work together to enable declarative GitOps deployments. Learn the trunk-based development strategy for multi-environment workflows and see how Helmfile centrally manages multiple releases.
Practical demo: ArgoCD + Helm application with automatic synchronization.
15:30–16:30💭 Questions & Answers
Our Benefits
All from one hand!
With our high-quality trainings and workshops, you can bring yourself and your team up to date. All this with many benefits that you get from us.
- High Practical Content
- 70% hands-on, 30% theory. You work continuously with real scenarios and take working code home with you. No PowerPoint battles, but directly applicable knowledge for your projects.
- Cloud Learning Environment
- DevNinjas Dojo: Your own Kubernetes clusters and VMs for each participant in the browser. No installation, works despite VPN/proxy/firewalls. You work with dedicated resources, not in shared environments.
- Experienced Trainers
- Full-time DevOps engineers and consultants from DevNinjas lead the workshops. Not external trainers, but specialized employees actively working on client projects and sharing real-world experience.
- Small Groups
- Maximum 8 participants per workshop. Everyone gets individual support from the trainer. Your specific questions and use cases get answered, not passed over in anonymous crowds.
- Real-World Scenarios
- No toy examples or hello-world demos. You work with production-grade setups: multi-container applications, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring stacks. Directly transferable to your production environments.
- Certification
- You receive an official certificate of attendance as PDF and a verified LinkedIn badge. Document your professional development for your employer, HR, and recruiters professionally.
Testimonials
How participants experience our trainings
4.6/ 5
10 reviews for this workshop · unfiltered
Trainer
4.7
Content
4.7
Didactics
4.4
DevNinjas overall: over 1,384 participants · 207 companies · 241 workshops
Including BMW, Bundeswehr, Deutsche Bahn and many more.
"My colleagues specifically looked for a sysadmin course for Docker with another provider and had an instructor who only set up an IDE for them and then only worked on a task sheet with development tasks. I had a course with lots of background information, an instructor who had a really extensive knowledge of the whole subject matter beyond the slides, and I feel optimally informed."
Johannes Bernstein
@TRIMET Gelsenkirchen SE
"The advanced Kubernetes workshop at DevNinjas really helped me grow professionally. The content was practical and excellently prepared, so even complex topics like RBAC, network policies and Ingress were conveyed in an understandable and directly applicable way. The deep expertise of the trainer was especially impressive and noticeable in every session. I can recommend this workshop to anyone who wants to use Kubernetes in production!"
Marius Büttner
@Siemens AG
"From my perspective, the workshop had the right speed and an appropriate level of challenge. The subject matter was explained clearly by the instructor and practically consolidated with well-distributed exercises. Adjusting the workshop focus to the participants wishes was not a problem. Valuable practical experiences were shared, and even more specific questions were gladly answered. The instructor's professional expertise and extensive practical experience on the subject gave this workshop a special quality."
S. Kaiser
@forcont business technology GmbH
"The instructor is very competent and was able to answer all questions satisfactorily even outside the presentation. It was a very pleasant workshop with a good learning pace. I learned a lot and look forward to applying and expanding my acquired knowledge in everyday work, as well as privately."
Schmucker
@RODIAS GmbH
"The training exceeded my expectations by far. It was excellently structured, and the trainer's expertise was evident from the very first moment. The topics were presented vividly and with practical examples, and the exercises were pleasantly challenging, exactly right for a course like this. Through targeted questions, the trainer drew me so deeply into the subject that I absolutely wanted to keep working after the session ended. The teaching was outstanding too: topics were explained clearly and the trainer always addressed follow-up questions. I can recommend DevNinjas one hundred percent."
Patrick J.
"In the workshop the most important Docker and Kubernetes topics were put together, prepared and explained superbly. The exercises fit precisely and were very well chosen in terms of difficulty. I am very satisfied with how much I learned in the five days and feel well prepared for upcoming tasks at work. Sure, you can teach yourself a lot on your own with AI tools, but without the workshop I would not have gained this overview or worked through so many exercises independently."
Christine L.
"The seminar was superbly prepared, the group pleasantly small and the materials first-class. An excellent instructor who knows the subject inside out, takes time for the participants and answers questions in detail. The learning material alternated in a balanced way between theory and hands-on exercises that were timed excellently."
Kevin H.
@Oest Holding GmbH
"All expectations met. Good technical expertise."
Manuel Köhn
@Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation
"Nico was very organized, technically excellent, and brought a great atmosphere from day one. He knows how to get people excited about the subject and conveys the knowledge very well. Questions were answered right away unless they would have given away later topics, and he then picked those up again at the right moment. All in all a very successful course and definitely a recommendation. Thank you, Nico, for the instructive and cool time."
Pascal S.
"I really enjoyed the Docker & Kubernetes workshop at DevNinjas. Nico explained the complex topics around containers and orchestration in a very understandable and practical way. The mix of theory and hands-on exercises was perfect for being able to apply everything directly. I was able to take a lot away for my everyday work and now feel significantly more confident working with Docker and Kubernetes."
Dominik Kneissl
@Siemens Healthineers
"Overall, I thought the training was very good. The instructor was technically very competent and gave plenty of input on every topic. On a personal level it was very pleasant too, which made it fun. The learning environment was absolutely exemplary in its setup and usability. I will definitely recommend the training and DevNinjas."
Marius B.
@Dataport
"The trainer's materials were very well prepared, and the approach was clearly structured, moving from the easy to the more demanding blocks of content. Advanced Kubernetes fundamentals and the path to a solution were shown using practical examples, and questions were always resolved with an answer and a fitting real-world example. My expectations were met, and I can only recommend this seminar."
Stefan J.
@BMI
"The "Docker & Kubernetes Bundle" training provided me with solid, practical knowledge for everyday work and enabled me to handle Docker and Kubernetes professionally. The excellently structured material offers real added value, even beyond the workshop. The combination of technical depth and interactive delivery by the trainer rounded off the whole experience. An experience that continues to help me even after the training."
Swen Strangfeld
@Bundesdruckerei GmbH
"It was fun and I learned a lot that I can actually apply directly in my company. The trainer's approach was very hands-on, and he repeatedly brought in real-world examples."
Felix R.
@Dirk Rossmann GmbH
"The workshop gave me a very good insight into Kubernetes and made working with containers much clearer. Nico delivered the content in a practical and well-structured way, so I could quickly find my way around. The hands-on exercises in particular helped me apply what I learned directly. For anyone looking for a solid introduction to Kubernetes, this workshop is definitely recommended."
Daniel Hagen
@DKB Service GmbH
"The CKAD content is extensive, and the hands-on exercises are helpful and necessary to really learn it. This course struck a good balance between enough practice and sufficient depth. The understanding conveyed over the three days is definitely enough to work through the remaining CKAD topics on your own, because the concepts are taught clearly. The learning environment worked smoothly and reliably."
Peter Menze
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Your Contact
Vincent Sturm
Key Account Manager
Looking for the right Kubernetes or DevOps training for your team? Vincent personally advises you on open workshops, certification prep and customized in-house training. He can also connect you with our consulting services. Get in touch with him directly.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, Kubernetes fundamentals are required. You should understand Pods, Deployments, Services, and Namespaces. Helm builds on Kubernetes and automates deployments (without K8s knowledge, you lack the context).
Preparation: Our Kubernetes introduction workshop (DW2) provides the ideal foundation. Alternatively: Docker + Kubernetes bundle (DW4) covers both topics at a package price.
Helm is a package manager with templating and release management, ideal for reusable charts and complex dependencies. Kustomize is an overlay tool without templating, suitable for simple customizations of existing YAML files. ArgoCD is a GitOps CD tool that can deploy both Helm charts and Kustomize overlays.
In practice, these tools complement each other: ArgoCD for declarative GitOps deployments, Helm for package management and versioning, Kustomize for lightweight adjustments without templating overhead. Many teams use Helm + ArgoCD together for production Kubernetes workflows.
Learn Helm 4, understand Helm 3. Helm 4 has been the current version since November 2025 with modern features (Server-Side Apply, OCI-first, WASM plugins). Helm 3 receives bug fixes until September 2026, security fixes until February 2027.
In practice: Many teams still use Helm 3, but new projects start with Helm 4. Helm 4 is backward compatible with Helm 3 charts (v2 API remains supported).
In our workshop: You learn Helm 4 from scratch while understanding the differences from Helm 3 (3-way merge vs. SSA, traditional repos vs. OCI). This allows you to work in both worlds and remain future-proof.
After the workshop, you master the complete Helm ecosystem and can start immediately in practice:
Deployment & Maintenance:
- Create and maintain production-ready Helm charts
- Multi-environment deployments (Dev/Stage/Prod) with values overrides
- Safely perform chart updates and rollbacks
Integration & Automation:
- CI/CD pipelines with Helm (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins)
- GitOps workflows with ArgoCD or Flux
- Test and validate Helm charts (helm-unittest, helm lint)
Enterprise Scenarios:
- Private chart repositories (OCI registry, ChartMuseum)
- Umbrella charts for microservice platforms
- Security & governance (policy checks, secret management)
Next steps: Preparation for CKA (DW6) or CKAD (DW5) certification, or deep dive with Kubernetes Advanced (DW3).
Yes, absolutely. Helm is the de facto standard for Kubernetes package management with over 10,000 public charts on Artifact Hub. The CNCF project (graduated) is under active development: Helm 4 (November 2025) brings Server-Side Apply, OCI-First, and WASM plugins.
Helm becomes more relevant in 2026, not less:
- Cloud-native adoption continues growing (Kubernetes is the standard platform)
- GitOps tools like ArgoCD and Flux rely on Helm charts
- Enterprise platforms (AWS EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE) use Helm for add-ons
- Vendor support: Nearly all major software vendors ship Helm charts (PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Prometheus, etc.)
Alternatives like Kustomize are suitable for simple overlays, but Helm remains essential for complex deployments, multi-environment workflows, and reusable packaging.
There is no standalone Helm certification. The Linux Foundation offers the SkillCred "Developing Helm Charts" (SC104): 45 minutes, USD 79 (as of July 2026), focused on practical chart development.
Helm knowledge is a prerequisite for the major Kubernetes certifications: both CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) and CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) expect Helm proficiency. Anyone planning to take either exam builds the necessary practical foundation in this workshop.
Our trainings usually take place from 9:00 to 16:00, both on-site and for public remote trainings.
For corporate trainings, other time models are flexible and can be worked out together.
All practical exercises take place in the DevNinjas Dojo, our browser-based cloud learning environment. Every participant receives dedicated resources: own Kubernetes clusters, VMs, containers (depending on the workshop topic). You work not in a shared environment, but have full control over your own infrastructure.
Benefits:
- Your own clusters & servers: You get dedicated resources for your exercises
- No software installation required: Everything runs in your browser
- Works everywhere: Even in strict enterprise networks with VPN, proxy, and firewalls
- Open protocols: SSH, HTTPS, standardized web terminals (no proprietary client)
- Ready immediately: Login and start with the exercise right away
You only need a modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) and internet access. The Dojo is available to you throughout the entire workshop.
Yes, upon completion you will receive an official certificate of attendance from DevNinjas as PDF. This confirms your successful participation and the topics covered. The certificate is perfect for conversations with your employer and your personnel file.
Additionally, you will receive a verified digital badge that you can directly embed in your LinkedIn profile (section "Licenses & Certifications"). The badge follows the Open Badges 2.0 standard and is verifiable via QR code at any time. This way you showcase your qualification and position yourself with recruiters.