Nelm is a New Open Source Project Improving Helm’s Capabilities
Recently, a new Cloud Native project called Nelm announced its general availability. An apparent reference to Helm, Nelm focuses on improving Helm’s offerings to better serve numerous Kubernetes users and operators.
Helm, usually called ‘the package manager for Kubernetes’, is one of the well-known Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. It has been in the market for many years and has become the de facto standard in the cloud native industry for packaging the software you want to run in Kubernetes. The CNCF declared Helm’s maturity level as ‘Graduated’ in 2020.
Origins of Nelm
The newly launched Nelm originates in werf, another open source project that joined the CNCF Sandbox in 2022. werf aims to glue existing technologies for containers and Kubernetes, such as Buildah and Helm, to implement CI/CD within Kubernetes in an opinionated way and facilitate following the best practices.
Initially, werf leveraged Helm for its deployment. Over time, the need for specific features during the deployment process required werf authors to fork Helm and use it in werf to provide its users the required functionality. With time, the growing number of differences required bigger underlying changes in the code base, making this internal project more significant than just a fork.
However, it was an internal venture of werf. The primary issue in making it public was the lack of a standalone command line interface (CLI), which was unnecessary for werf as it embedded ‘the better Helm’ as a library. Without the CLI, the newly created project would be less interesting to the public (i.e., the broad cloud native community).
As a result, the authors of werf decided to implement CLI, aiming to benefit a much bigger audience than just werf users. Once the groundwork was laid, Nelm announced the rollout on Reddit and other social platforms, which sparked interest from a vast community.
Nelm Features
Nelm’s features currently include using the server-side apply mechanism for updating Kubernetes resources, powerful resource ordering capabilities and resource state tracking, an actual preview for the new releases, improved management for the custom resource definitions and secrets management. All the features are provided while maintaining 100% compatibility with existing Helm charts. It is a crucial requirement of Nelm since most of the existing software for Kubernetes is already packaged in this format: Being able to reuse the same charts is an essential enabler for the tool.
While the Nelm project is formally new, it is important to note that its functionality has been battle-tested under the werf hood for quite a while. Nelm became the default and only deployment engine in werf, starting from its 2.0 release in May 2024. According to the official project stats published at the beginning of 2025, werf is used by at least 15,000 projects (Git repositories). The novelty in Nelm is its CLI tool, which was recently released together with a formal announcement of this project.
Nelm’s Future
Nelm’s roadmap mentions other enhancements the project will bring to Helm-based deployment scenarios. These include further iterations on secret management with the built-in secrets operations (SOPS) integration, advanced chart dependency management and an alternative templating approach that can be used in newly developed charts.
After seeing the preliminary interest of the cloud native community, which was reassured by the hundreds of GitHub stars it gained within a few days of launch, it is definitive that the practicality of Nelm’s approach to improving Helm will be appreciated by all. While there is no doubt Nelm can benefit existing werf users, as proved by years of experience, we still have to see how the wider community will adopt Nelm and further contribute to its development.
