Hello guys!
I’m from a quite large Italian community that uses Discourse as the tool for their forum.
While we love Discourse, we’ve also observed some difficulties deploying it on Kubernetes, through some kind of “standard” procedures.
I feel the pain of the maintainers 
I’ve been working at Open Networking Foundation for years, and one of the biggest challenges has been moving CORD -one of our biggest platforms- away from scripts-based installations to Dockerfiles/docker-compose and Docker images hosted on DockerHub + helm-charts. While there’s a reasonable fear in doing so, and if a solution that fits all the cases never really exists, I can tell we absolutely saw the benefits of it since the very first deployments.
Usually, the biggest step to take is to enter in the mindset to leave existing tools do whatever they can do best Docker has installation procedures, that are standard, easy and already well-documented. Scripts are something custom, that often needs customizations and maintenance.
Also, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to use the original Docker images / helm-charts as Discourse dependencies (i.e. unicorn, postgres, redis, …).
I’d suggest to tackle the basics first (i.e. having a Dockerfile, docker-compose, and a dockerhub automated build for each component). Once this is done (with the proper software and docs modifications), the helm-charts development is the easiest thing.
I’d be very happy to help, even having a call together to discuss pros and cons of the solutions proposed above.
Along my brief research, I’ve also noticed that Bitnami (super famous in the Docker space) has come up with some images (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-discourse#how-to-use-this-image). I was wondering if this was some separate work they’ve been doing alone, or something coordinated with you. It may be a very good starting point. If there was no partnership with them, I’d suggest it as a possible way to go. Not sure if they would do it for free, but I may be a possibility.
FYI I’ve opened an issue on their repo to know more about the work that has been done (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-discourse/issues/132).
Please, let me know your thoughts and if I can help anyhow.