The firm I work at developed an internal library (open source soon hopefully!) that does all our templating in Python, example:
import os
"""
Imports redacted, but this imports our library
"""
NAME = "my_app"
PORT = 5000
DEPLOY_ENV = os.environ["DEPLOY_ENV"]
deploy_all(
create_stateful_service(
NAME, http_port=PORT, cpu=2000, memory=500
),
create_ingress(
NAME,
service_name=NAME,
service_port=PORT,
hostnames=["myapp.internal.com"],
),
)
In the background, this converts a bunch of objects to YAML, leveraging the fact that objects in Python are just dictionaries. It then takes these objects and sends them to the K8S API. Really improved our DevEx since you can do complex tasks like "define a deployment, deploy it, and then check server status" because it is all just Python at the end of the day.
I was tinkering with a similar approach to this, using Python objects to generate the YAML. I'm not working in it right now, but I'd love to see other tools use this approach.
It should be like that from the very beginning, any and all configuration management systems that chose YAML as base instead of DSL (even if DSL is just a subset of Python or Lua) have same problems.
What do you use templating for that made you not want to use Helm? Granted it's buggy as hell, but the fact that it automates so much operational process makes it save way more time over templating, in my experience.
Using Helm made me not want to use Helm! Joking, Helm is what I would use but still think there is a better way to do templating. This tool scratches that itch.
Edit: formatting