[theptip]

A lot of folks are using Helm, but I find it very opaque to debug when templates go wrong (and I feel quite strongly that we shouldn't be writing untyped templates for our models). Also I found writing reusable spec components to be very difficult, e.g. a reverse proxy that I add to a number of pods.

I use pykube (also worth looking at the incubator project client-python) to write deploy scripts in Python; client-python is particularly nice as it uses OpenAPI specs to give you type hinting on the API objects/fields that you're writing. Much more civilized than typing bare yaml into a text editor.

If Python isn't your thing you can generate your own client from the OpenAPI specs, though I've found the client generation process to be a bit buggy.