[jitl]

The breadth of different tool styles for Kubernetes is really interesting.

At Airbnb we’ve built a tool that’s most analogous to Ksonnet or Forge, but trades a lot of flexibility/extensibility for simplicity. We have this pre-baked model that your kube config has to fit into, and we don’t allow much direct pass through from our config files to raw kubernetes manifest. The upside is that limits the divergence of configuration between any two services, which greatly reduces bus factor and improves maintain ability. I’ve seen many a nightmare in our chef monorepo – no need to go back to ultra-flexible (even Turing complete!) configuration.

Another key feature is that there’s no special daemon or whatever required. Our build/deploy system runs the same commands you run on your laptop to build/deploy development versions to your dev kube. This increases anyone’s ability to introspect and debug the system, versus a tool with a daemon that’s doing who-knows-what, and you struggle to get debug access to the right parts.

I hope we can open source it one day, but right now it’s under heavy development and has lots of Airbnb-specific magicks built-in.