Helm release creation fails: Secret "sh.helm.release.v1.<release>.v1" is invalid: data: Too long (>1048576 bytes)

[phillippark-wb]

Description

When installing a Helm chart with large embedded templates or dependencies, the release fails with the following error:

Environment

• Helm version: v3.15.1
• Kubernetes version: v1.33 (EKS)
• Cloud Provider: AWS (EKS)
• Chart: pinpoint-apm/pinpoint-kubernetes (very large chart with multiple dependencies)
• Namespace: pinpoint

---

Steps to Reproduce

1. Use any Helm chart with a large number of templates or subcharts
2. Install via Terraform Helm provider

   helm upgrade --install pinpoint ./charts/pinpoint --namespace pinpoint
   
   
   

Error: create: failed to create: Secret "sh.helm.release.v1.pinpoint.v1" is invalid: data: Too long: may not be more than 1048576 bytes

[emircanagac]

Hi @phillippark-wb,

My apologies for the significant delay in responding.

Thank you for this report. This is a known Helm/Kubernetes limitation when an "umbrella chart" becomes too large.

The root cause is that our default installation (with global.metric.enabled: true) tries to render 5 very large subcharts (MySQL, Zookeeper, Redis, Kafka, and Pinot). The combined size of all these templates is just on the edge of the 1 MiB (1048576 bytes) limit for a Kubernetes Secret.

You are seeing this error on EKS, while our own tests on Minikube succeeded. This suggests that different Kubernetes environments (like EKS) or different Helm versions may enforce the size limit more strictly or compress data differently, causing the installation to fail for you.

We are working on a long-term fix (like supporting external dependencies). However, for an immediate workaround, you can reduce the installation size by disabling the Metric Profile.

Setting global.metric.enabled=false prevents the chart from installing the large Kafka and Pinot dependencies. This reduces the total installation size (from 5 subcharts down to 3), which reliably avoids the 1 MiB limit.
Bash

This installs Pinpoint with Flink/Batch (Classic Mode)

helm upgrade --install pinpoint ./charts/pinpoint --namespace pinpoint
--set global.metric.enabled=false

We will update our README.md to make this the default, ensuring the "all-in-one" installation works for everyone out of the box. Thank you for your patience.

[phillippark-wb]

@emircanagac Got it working now, appreciate your help