Farewell, gardener/controlplane Helm Chart

With Gardener v1.142, the deprecated gardener/controlplane Helm chart has been removed. All local development scenarios and e2e tests now run exclusively on gardener-operator — the canonical way to deploy Gardener. This marks the end of a migration journey that began over a year ago.

gardener-operator Is the Way Forward

The gardener-operator is the single supported method for deploying and managing Gardener landscapes. It reconciles a Garden resource, creating and managing the virtual garden cluster with its etcd, kube-apiserver, gardener-apiserver, and all other required components. If you haven't migrated yet, now is the time — the legacy Helm chart no longer exists.

What Changed for Local Development

The removal also brings a cleaner local development experience:

• New dev-setup/ directory — all development-related configuration (Skaffold files, scripts, configs) is consolidated in a single dev-setup/ folder, replacing files previously scattered across the repository.
• Kustomize replaces Helm — the local setup uses Kustomize with a base/components/overlay pattern. Each scenario (single-node, multi-node, multi-zone) is an overlay that composes a base configuration with scenario-specific patches.
• Unified kubeconfig directory — all kubeconfigs live in dev-setup/kubeconfigs/ with subdirectories for each cluster type (runtime, seed, virtual-garden).
• Simplified Make targets — make kind-up is now an alias for make kind-single-node-up, and the former make operator-seed-{up,dev,down} targets are renamed to make gardener-{up,dev,down}.
• Merged kubeconfig script — generate-admin-kubeconfig-local.sh is merged into generate-kubeconfig.sh with subcommands (shoot, virtual-garden, self-hosted-shoot).

The Experience Stays Familiar

Despite the restructuring, the top-level workflow remains the same:

make kind-up       # Start KinD cluster (picks your scenario)
make gardener-up   # Deploy Gardener via gardener-operator

The scenario is now selected at kind-up time and automatically detected by subsequent commands — no more switching between incompatible make targets mid-session.

Breaking Changes for Developers

If you maintain an existing local development setup or CI scripts:

• Replace make operator-seed-{up,dev,down} with make gardener-{up,dev,down}
• Update references to ./hack/usage/generate-admin-kubeconfig-local.sh → use ./hack/usage/generate-kubeconfig.sh --help
• For the remote setup, the seed kubeconfig moved from dev-setup/remote/kubeconfigs/kubeconfig to dev-setup/kubeconfigs/remote/kubeconfig

References

• Review Meeting Recording (Helm chart removal section)
• gardener/gardener#14614
• Getting Started Locally
• How to Set Up a Gardener Landscape