[_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.