05-14, 12:15–12:45 (Europe/Madrid), Gallery
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?"
This will focus on the competing forces of SaaS vs self-hosted and how Gitpod has used the Installer as a unifying force.
This will be targeted towards maintainers of open source projects and applications where on-premise installation is necessary. It will be an exploration of the reasoning why we chose this approach, the benefits we found and the pitfalls encountered. It will also discuss how the community reacted.
Lastly, it will be an honest assessment of whether ditching Helm for third-party installation was a wise move.
Senior Engineer - Gitpod
Simon has been working as a software engineer since 2006, in which time he's done work for the likes of Gitpod, DPD, Specsavers, British Pathé, the NHS, the Red Cross and others. He's used pretty much all of the major languages over the years and since 2017 has been focused on building DevOps solutions and Cloud-native applications that help engineers to work faster and more productively. Since 2021, he has been working with Gitpod to improve the self-hosted experience, which is relied upon by companies with specific security and compliance requirements.
When not behind a computer he's a keen gardener, beekeeper and makes his own sausages.