| That's what I've been finding a lot lately. Kubenetes manifests have very complete schemas, but there's not really any official concise way to express them or relations between them. I've come to the conclusion that helm/templating is awful. Every helm chart I've ever seen suffers from the kitchen sink problem. Dependencies don't really address the problem either, because that's not really resolving a whole lot in the end. What I've found so far is that Kustomize strikes a solid balance between an off the shelf working config provided from official sources, and making changes myself to suit my environment. Instead of the developer maintaining a kitchen sink approach, they can have something (or a set of somethings) that are straight forward, and I can maintain a set of tweaks that work for me. Unfortunately Kustomize's documentation is not that great, and it is incredibly awkward to work with. I'm hoping that solid operators come out for most applications instead of helm charts. I'm not 100% sure that they're going to be substantially better than helm, but I'm hoping between operators and kustomize I can link applications together in a way that I get properly maintained applications for minimal effort (ala AWS), without having to maintain a large code base linking all the bits together. I do think I need to look into pulumi as it might be in the direction I want to go, but I remain skeptical. Terraform has some good ideas, but is too rigid for kubernetes, and I feel like I'm giving up the flexibility of kubectl. I like the idea of having a state and resolving differences between desired and actual state, but not enough to rewrite everything in HCL. |
i authored https://get-kapp.io based on my previous experiences managing iaas resources as cattle. it strongly revolves around idea of managing chnageset between actual and desired configuration.
it was also built as a tool that solely focuses on deployment to k8s, leaving configuration building (ie templating) to other tools.
take a look at it, would love to hear what you think.
on a side note, someone recently asked me to also wrap kapp as a terraform provider: https://github.com/k14s/terraform-provider-k14s