Deploying Harbor on Kubernetes using Helm

Why deploy Harbor on Kubernetes? Understanding Harbor architecture and components How these components work together: Deploying Harbor on Kubernetes using Helm Summary: Posted on January 5, 2026 by Dhruv Tyagi and Daniel Jiang, Broadcom CNCF projects highlighted in this post Harbor is an indispensable open-source container image registry, offering robust features like policy-driven security, role-based access control, vulnerability scanning, image signing, image replication and distribution. Deploying Harbor is a common and critical step for organizations looking to streamline their containerization workflows. Harbor offers significant value through its comprehensive features and can be deployed on a virtual machine. This blog post will pick up where we left off, guiding you through the process of deploying Harbor on an upstream conformant Kubernetes platform using Helm If you are interested to learn more about Harbor and how to deploy it on a VM, check out our previous blog. Deploying Harbor on Kubernetes offers several advantages: Scalability: Kubernetes enables horizontal scaling of Harbor components based on demand. Individual microservices can be scaled independently to handle increased load. High availability: Kubernetes provides built-in mechanisms for pod recovery, health checks, and self-healing. If a Harbor component fails, Kubernetes automatically restarts it, ensuring minimal downtime. Resource efficiency: Kubernetes optimizes resource utilization through efficient scheduling and resource allocation Declarative management: Infrastructure-as-Code practices with Helm charts make Harbor deployments reproducible, version-controlled, and easy to maintain across multiple environments. Native integration: Running Harbor on Kubernetes creates a seamless experience for containerized workloads, as both the registry and the applications consuming images exist within the same ecosystem. Simplified updates: Helm makes upgrading Harbor versions straightforward with rolling updates that minimize service disruption. Harbor follows a microservices architecture, with each component serving a specific purpose in the overall container registry ecosystem.