Draft is a very simple tool and it's not just based on Helm, it is using Helm under the hood.

You will probably not find much use for Draft given the more advanced state of your tooling. It's been described as "a gateway drug to k8s" because, for the uninitiated, it simplifies the process of "OK, I want to put my app on K8s, what now?" – it sets you up with a reasonable default chart, and a dummy Dockerfile based on what kind of app the Draft logic decides your app is. (Eg. it's going to recommend ruby:onbuild if you have a Ruby app.)

That might work out of the box, more likely you need to make some changes in the Dockerfile, but that could very well be all.

It's really more like an advertisement for Deis. It's the "zeroconf" version of Deis. If you've never heard of Deis, I'll be happy to tell you more about that; Deis has a builder service/pod and acts as a git repository, so you set it up as a git remote with the deis commandline tool and 'git push deis' to prompt a release upgrade. It is more likely what you are probably expecting as a piece of your CI/CD solution.

For people that aren't already fluent users of git, k8s, helm, charts... Draft is easier to get started with, and it gives a chance to expose you to all of those things, without making any of it prerequisite knowledge to spin up your app on k8s at once.

For literally anyone else, you're going to get a much better experience from Deis, which is not only out of Beta but long past the 2.0 milestone (when it moved to K8s from the prior CoreOS/Fleet-based stack.) Deis is installed via helm, but after that you do not need to use the Helm client. Your apps can use Procfile-style or Dockerfile for deployments.

The builder is very modern and developed, and as it evolves, it picks up a lot of efficiencies that you might have seen before on Heroku if you're familiar with that platform, making it very convenient to work with. (That also means it brings the baggage of 12-Factor, if you consider that as baggage...)

To be clear, I think that Deis is using helm under the hood too, but you never have to interact with helm or your chart.

Draft is written so you could probably avoid ever running the helm client, but it is a much thinner layer of sugar on top. You are very near the helm charts, but in Deis you might never even realize that there are helm releases associated with your app. The Deis client interface is pretty fully featured, almost drop-in as a comparison to heroku client. Using Draft, you are encouraged to edit your charts, but with Deis it is well-hidden and there is probably never any need to do that.

Service brokers (for supporting dynamic allocation of things like shared instances of postgres and redis, like you get with heroku) are a thing, but they are newer and I have not seen them being used in practice yet.

By Deis, are you referring to Workflow? [1] There's no product called "Deis" anymore.

Workflow seems too high-level and large for my taste. It's an entire PaaS on top of Kubernetes, which also brings way too much to the table (edge routing, log/metrics management, alerting, etc.).

[1] https://deis.com/workflow/

The advantage of Helm over static K8s configs or simple templates is that charts can use other charts for complex dependencies, and can have multiple releases with different values. The latter is useful for different environments (dev, staging, production) or for changing dynamic values separate from template code (replicas, resources, versions).

As long as Helm can't pull dependencies directly from git, it's still not a good fit for git-versioned repositories.

Try Deis. It's a little more constraining, but it uses Helm under the hood, and it uses a git commit as the basis of each release.