Focusing only on images and templates you can create a helm template that will spawn an X amount of pods by:

• Creating a Chart.yaml file
• Creating a values.yaml file with the variable that store all image names
• Creating a template with a {{ range }} directive
• Testing

Below is the structure of files and directories:

❯ tree helm-dir
helm-dir
├── Chart.yaml
├── templates
│   └── pod.yaml
└── values.yaml

1 directory, 3 files

Create Chart.yaml file

Below is the Chart.yaml file:

apiVersion: v2
name: helm-templates
description: A Helm chart for spawning pods from images
version: 0.1.0

Create a values.yaml file with the variable that store all image names

Below is the simple values.yaml file with different images name that will be used with a template:

different_images: 
  - ubuntu 
  - nginx

Create a template that with a {{ range }} directive

This template is stored in templates directory with a name pod.yaml

Below YAML definition will be a template for all the pods:

{{- range .Values.different_images }}
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: {{ . }} 
  labels:
    app: {{ . }} 
spec:
  restartPolicy: Never
  containers:
  - name: {{ . }} 
    image: {{ . }} 
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    command: 
    - sleep 
    - infinity
---
{{- end }} 

{{- range .Values.different_images }} will iterate over different_images variable and replace the {{ . }} with an image name.

Test

Run below command from helm-dir directory to check if helm YAML definitions of pods are correctly created:

$ helm install NAME . --dry-run --debug

You should get an output with multiple pods definition that look similar to one below:

# Source: helm-templates/templates/pod.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: ubuntu
  labels:
    app: ubuntu
spec:
  restartPolicy: Never
  containers:
  - name: ubuntu
    ports:
      - containerPort: 3000
    image: ubuntu
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    command: 
    - sleep 
    - infinity
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: 500Mi
        cpu: 500m 

You can now run: $ helm install NAME .

and check if pods spawned correctly with $ kubectl get pods:

NAME     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
nginx    1/1     Running   0          8s
ubuntu   1/1     Running   0          8s

Please take a look on additional resources:

• Helm.sh: Chart best practices
• Helm.sh: Chart template guide: Control structures
• Stackoverflow.com: How can I iteratively create pods from list using helm