Helm is a truly excellent ecosystem and is rightly valued by the world over for giving full customisation of deployments. For open-source projects with a finite number of support engineers, full customisation is not always something that is desirable. Sometimes, you need to provide opinionated guide rails for people in order to provide effective support for your product.

This session will focus on the reasons why Gitpod has deprecated its Helm charts and switched to a custom-built Installer. Simon will explore some of the benefits and pitfalls experienced and how the community reacted to such a seismic change. He will also answer the question - “would he do it again?”