[atombender]

Agreed. Unstructured text templating to generate structures YAML is a terrible idea, which was previously shown with Ansible and Salt. (Salt provides a way to generate its YAML declaratively using Python, which seems to me a much better idea. Not sure about Ansible?)

I think Jsonnet is an intriguing idea here. Jsonnet is not well known, but apparently popular inside Google. It has variables and iteration, and allows you to cobble together structures by merging them, iterating over them, and so on, and the output is JSON, which happens to be what the Kubernetes API uses anyway. (There is a system that uses Jsonnet with Kubernetes, called Ksonnet, but that tool seems bafflingly overengineered to me.)

I've been dwelling on another idea: A system where you simply push all your templates -- what Helms calls a chart -- to Kubernetes as a single CRD (e.g. "kind: Template"). The templates reference variables, which you then push separately as another CRD ("kind: Vars"). Then the final component is a controller that listens to changes to templates and variables, and whenever one changes, expands the templates, compares them with the current manifests, and applies any differences.

To achieve controlled rollouts and rollbacks, you have a system on top that's similar to Helm, but it can be completely separate. You version the templates/vars as releases, not the underlying manifests generated by them.

[wstrange]

Helm Version 3 will adopt CRDs for release and application state. There will no longer be a server side component (tiller).

It should be much easier to integrate other tools or templating systems with V3.

https://github.com/kubernetes-helm/community/blob/master/hel...

[lobster_johnson]

Interesting, but I never saw Tiller as an issue. Quite the opposite, I want less client and more server.

[_5meq]

I've used both ansible and salt extensively.

Ansible is similar to salt, but is imperative as opposed to declarative. I've found I prefer Ansible for the scale I work at. Salt has a better eventing and provisioning story though, and I can see the value in declaring your environment's "state" using pillars and states. There's just a lot more to Salt and I like Ansible's simplicity.

In Ansible/k8s_raw, you can declare your k8 resources in Ansible as real yaml, or you can template YAML using the jinja2 templating language, or you can generate YAML using a python library and use THAT yaml.

Ansible is a full-scale configuration management and provisioning library that happened to implement a Kubernetes module, whereas Helm is only a package manager.