A while ago I wrote, why Terraform tool is not enough for SaaS here. Today, I am extending the same series for Helm -- covering the purpose they serve and why they are NOT enough to build your cloud offering or control plane.

Helm charts are widely used for Kubernetes application deployment, offering a templated approach to package and manage applications. However, when it comes to building a full-fledged SaaS control plane, relying solely on Helm is not enough.

We think that Terraform is an excellent IaC tool if you want to setup your cloud infrastructure once. However, when it comes to SaaS, we feel that it falls short on many grounds. Here are the basic set of things that are missing in Terraform to even accomplish proper infrastructure management for building SaaS.

I was among the authors at AWS who pioneered the first SaaS control plane back in 2009, laying the groundwork for many SaaS offerings both within and beyond AWS. Crafting the SaaS control plane, we delved deep into fundamental questions: