Helm 4: What’s New in the Open Source Kubernetes Package Manager?
Helm — originally a hackathon project called Kate’s Place — turned 10 in 2025, marking the milestone with the release of Helm 4, its first major update in six years. Created by Matt Butcher and colleagues as a playful take on “K8s,” the early project won a small prize but quickly grew into a serious effort when Deus leadership recognized the need for a Kubernetes package manager. Renamed Helm, it rapidly expanded with community contributors and became one of the first CNCF graduating projects.
Helm 4 reflects years of accumulated design debt and evolving use cases. After the rapid iterations of Helm 1, 2, and 3, the latest version modernizes logging, improves dependency management, and introduces WebAssembly-based plugins for cross-platform portability—addressing the growing diversity of operating systems and architectures. Beyond headline features, maintainers emphasize that mature projects increasingly deliver “boring” but essential improvements, such as better logging, which simplify workflows and integrate more cleanly with other tools. Helm’s re-architected internals also lay the foundation for new chart and package capabilities in upcoming 4.x releases.
Learn more from The New Stack about Helm:
The Super Helm Chart: To Deploy or Not To Deploy?
Kubernetes Gets a New Resource Orchestrator in the Form of Kro
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Where Does WebAssembly Fit in the Cloud Native World?
In this episode, Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon Technologies, discusses the potential impact of the component model on WebAssembly (Wasm) and its integration into the cloud-native landscape. WebAssembly is a binary instruction format enabling code to run anywhere, written in developers' preferred languages. The component model aims to provide a common way for WebAssembly libraries to express their needs and connect with other modules, reducing the barriers and maintenance of existing libraries. Butcher believes this model could be a game changer, allowing new languages to compile WebAssembly and utilize existing libraries seamlessly.
WebAssembly also shows promise in delivering on the long-awaited potential of serverless computing. Unlike traditional virtual machines and containers, WebAssembly boasts a rapid startup time and addresses various developer challenges. Butcher states that developers have been eagerly waiting for a platform with these characteristics, hinting at a potential resurgence of serverless. He clarifies that WebAssembly is not a "Kubernetes killer" but can coexist with container technologies, evident from the Kubernetes ecosystem's interest in supporting WebAssembly.
The episode explores further developments in WebAssembly and its potential to play a central role in the cloud-native ecosystem.
Learn more from The New Stack about WebAssembly and Fermyon Technologies:
WebAssembly Overview, News, and Trends
WebAssembly vs. Kubernetes
Fermyon Cloud: Save Your WebAssembly Serverless Data Locally
The philosopher who believes in Web Assembly
Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.
Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.
Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.
Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.
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What’s Next in WebAssembly?
AUSTIN, TEX. —What’s the future of WebAssembly — Wasm, to its friends — the binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine that allows developers to build in their favorite programming language and run their code anywhere?
For Matt Butcher, CEO and founder of Fermyon Technologies, the future of Wasm lies in running it outside of the browser and running it inside of everything, from proxy servers to video games.”
And, he added, “the really exciting part is being able to run it in the cloud, as well as a cloud service alongside like virtual machines and containers.”
For this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Butcher was interviewed by Heather Joslyn, features editor of TNS.
With key programming languages like Ruby, Python and C# adding support for WebAssembly’s new capabilities, Wasm is gaining critical mass, Butcher said.
“What we're talking about now is the realization of the potential that's been around in WebAssembly for a long time. But as people get excited, and open source projects start to adopt it, then what we're seeing now is like the beginning of the tidal wave.”
But before widespread adoption can happen, Butcher said, there’s still work to be done in preparing the environment the next wave of Wasm: cloud computing.
Along with other members of the Bytecode Alliance, such as Cosmonic, Fastly, Intel and Fermyon is working to improve the developer experience and environment this year. The next step, he added is to “start to build this first wave of applications that really highlight where it can happen for us.”
The rise of Wasm represents a new era in cloud native technology, Butcher noted. “We love containers. Many of us have been involved in the Kubernetes ecosystem for years and years. I built Helm originally; that's still, in a way, my baby.
“But also we're excited because now we're finding solutions to some problems that we didn't see get solved in the container ecosystem. And that's why we talk about it as sort of like the next wave.”
Wasm and a ‘Frictionless’ Dev Experience
Fermyon introduced its “frictionless” WebAssembly platform in June here at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America. The platform, built on technologies including HashiCorp’s Nomad and Consul, enables the writing of microservices and web applications. Fermyon’s open source tool, Spin, helps developers push apps from their local dev environments into their Fermyon platform.
One aspect of Wasm’s future that Butcher highlighted in our Makers discussion is how it can be scalable while also remaining lightweight in terms of the cloud resources it consumes.
“Along with creating this great developer experience in a secure platform, we're also going to help people save money on their cloud costs, because cloud costs have just kind of ballooned out of control,” he said.
“If we can be really mindful of the resources we use, and help the developer understand what it means to write code that can be nimble, and can be light on resource usage. The real objective is to make it so when they write code, it just happens to have those characteristics.”
For those interested in taking WebAssembly for a spin, Fermyon has created an online game called Finicky Whiskers, intended to show how microservices can be reimagined with Wasm.
Helm, with Matt Butcher
In celebration of Helm graduating to a top-level CNCF project, Adam and Craig. talk to its creator and primary architect, Matt Butcher of the Deis Labs team at Microsoft Azure.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
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Chatter of the week Adam talks about these baby wipes
Craig talks about these baby wipes
News of the week Red Hat Virtual Summit news: OpenShift 4.4
OpenShift Serverless
OpenShift Virtualization
Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes
Azure Red Hat OpenShift upgraded to v4
OpenShift 4.3 on IBM Power
Red Hat Marketplace
More ways Red Hat are here to help
Azure Kubernetes Service: Windows Server Containers, Private Clusters and Managed Identities now GA
Windows Server Containers are GA on GKE too
Episode 70, with Patrick Lang
Ingress for Anthos Kaggle writes about using it for gRPC
Explore Anthos with a sample deployment
Celebrating Helm's graduation
The Safety Boat: Kubernetes and Rust by Taylor Thomas from Deis Labs
Announcing Vitess 6
Couchbase Autonomous Operator 2.0
Kong for Kubernetes 0.8
Tern 2.0
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020
Alcide look at Kubernetes as a Service
Anthos Service Mesh deep-dive
GigaOm Radars, by Enrico Signoretti Data Storage for Kubernetes
Hosted Kubernetes solutions
Federated Kubernetes
Links from the interview Matt Butcher Doctor of Philosphy
Why One Philosopher Left Academia
Celebrating Helm's graduation
Helm A floppy disk
History of Helm Introducing Helm
Why Kubernetes Needs Helm
Deis In 2016
The Illustrated Childrens Guide to Kubernetes
k8splace
Deployment Manager for Kubernetes
Skippbox
Bitnami
Helm 3 transition by Matt Fisher
Upgrading from Windows 1.0 to 8.0
Helm charts and Helm Hub
TUF and in-toto
Is there a Helm and Operators showdown? Operators blog by Brandon Philips
First Helm Summit
Episode 43, with Brian Grant
Swag Helm coffee cup
Deis socks
Printed copy of The Illustrated Childrens Guide
Deis gift satchel
Tide pen
Deis acquired by Microsoft, 3 years ago
CNAB, Brigade and Krustlet
Techne and Sophia
Matt Butcher on Twitter