[freedomben]

Personally, I don't like Helm. I think for the vast majority of usecases where all you need is some simple templating/substitution, it just introduces way more complexity and abstraction than it is worth.

I've been really happy with just using `envsubst` and environment variables to generate a manifest at deploy time. It's easy with most CI systems to "archive" the manifest, and it can then be easily read by a human or downloaded/applied manually for debugging with. Deploys are also just `cat k8s/${ENV}/deploy.yaml | envsubt > output.yaml && kubectl apply -f output.yaml`

I've also experimented with using terraform. It's actually been a good enough experience that I may go fully with terraform on a new project and see how it goes.

[linuxftw]

You might like kubernetes kustomize if you don't care for helm (IMO, just embrace helm, you can keep your charts very simple and it's straight forward). Kustomize takes a little getting used to, but it's a nice abstraction and widely used.

I cannot recommend terraform. I use it daily, and daily I wish I did not. I think Pulumi is the future. Not as battle tested, but terraform is a mountain of bugs anyway, so it can't possibly be worse.

Just one example where terraform sucks: You cannot both deploy a kubernetes cluster (say an EKS/AKS cluster) and then use kubernetes_manifest provider in a single workspace. You must do this across two separate terraform runs.