Modern container platforms which are managed by GitOps solutions like Argo CD require strategies to promote settings and configurations for various applications and components on different stages like development, integration and production.

Using Helm simplifies parameterized deployment of commonly used applications (e.g. from the CNCF landscape), but it's often hard to grasp what is really deployed. Seemingly simple Chart updates could lead to breaking changes, missing components or incompatible configurations.

It could be a challenge to get insights what is changed by automated Helm umbrella chart updates done by Renovate. With hydration the platform engineer gets insights of the manifest changes supported by the version control system.

We want to share our own experiences with different promotion approaches like the Argo CD Source Hydrator, gitops-promoter or hydrations done with GitHub Actions workflows and give ideas which solution could be suitable for different platform requirements.

Key insights you'll discover:

- Get an understanding for the Helm hydration (rendered manifests) pattern
- Understand promotion patterns
- Get insights on rendered Kubernetes manifests
- Gain confidence for future Helm chart updates
- Learn how to implement a GitHub Actions hydration workflow
- Benefit from drift-free promotion process
- Robust gating system