[Octabrain]

I have to admit that I would chose Kustomize any day of the week. I personally find it easier to debug, version, grasp what is going on behind the scenes and simpler to maintain and operate. Also, to be fair, I have to admit that I've had a few negative experiences with Helm that made me to develop a negative bias against it. The main one being, to make the story short: I, as a DevOps guy, had the unpleasant experience of having to take care of the deployment process of a HeLLm chart(s) pile of crap that a very opinionated yet not very knowledgeable (on DevOps practices) team of developers created in a company I worked for in the past. It was composed by a myriad of obscure charts, jammed together as a house of cards. If that wasn't enough, the main chart was being called from a bash script that called Ansible and it pulled some data from a repo and rendered values coming from a repo into the values.yaml. The process of deploying that thing implied, apart from a couple of good hours of your time, to also have to perform some debugging sorcery with kubectl (removing this, modifying that etc) in a meeting while screen sharing your terminal with the proud parents of that monster. Absolute nightmare that still giving me sweaty hand palms to this day.

Anyways, I want to take the opportunity to ask other DevOps in the room something: What workflow do you use for performing CD for a bunch of Helm charts? I mean, I guess you version a bunch of values.yaml files in a repo but how do you manage the installation of the repository from the CD runner and so on? I'm curious because from the top of my head, Helm implies the runner (the actor who calls Helm to install a chart) to install a repository and then install the package from that repository passing to it the path to the values.yaml file, but on a CD pipeline, this actor is usually a disposable container. Do you install during one of the steps of the CD pipeline the repositories from an in-house created script perhaps every time the pipeline runs? Are you hopefully using a GitOps approach instead?

Thanks in advance for any answer.

[totallywrong]

That was just badly done as anything can be. The template engine takes some getting used to, specially without Go experience. But I'd much rather have that than a million lines of manifests as in with Kustomize. That said, you need either Argo or Flux and only deploy Helm charts with GitOps workflows.