[tdubey]

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.

Edit: formatting

[hosh]

I wrote something similar using Ruby a while back. https://github.com/matsuri-rb/matsuri

I even have a helm plugin that would let you specify all the command line options and values so that it can be tracked in git and consistently applied

There’s also tools for transforms on raw manifests so you can track changes (in code) from upstream manifests

[polyrand]

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.

[edwardmcfarlane]

Nice, I've seen similar setups like this with Go before. Maybe that's the better way to do it, use a proper language instead of yamls for config.

[adql]

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.