[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.