[chrissoundz]

"Kubernetes manifests are an unnecessarily detailed abstraction for most software developers. Developers don't need as much control. Therefore, they need higher-level abstractions, which hide more detail."

Agreed... Though I think there is a different solution. Instead of coming up with all these hardcoded formats and standards (docker-compose, k8s, etc, helm, ansible) which essentially are just 'functions' that map X to Y.

Instead of defining 'docker-compose' files, just define the containers itself. And if required, map that to a docker-compose, or k8s manifest or whatever. Remove all these unnecessary layers that aren't really that helpful - because each standard or implementation has it's own parser, error handling etc - why bother with all this?

And just use something like Nix for this. Or just define it as a common python value. Otherwise we end up building all sorts of templating and ugly programming-in-yaml. You could take a look at https://docs.hercules-ci.com/arion/#_arion_compose_nix to see what this might look like - uses Nix to do something like docker-compose.