[stackskipton]

Since I'm Ops type so I took a look. Here are my thoughts in random order.

Templating systems are always frustrating, and I couldn't find CLI to spit out exactly what I was going to get. Kustomize ability to build exactly what cluster is going to consume is one of those features you miss when you don't have it.

Tying it to Kubernetes is both good and bad. Alot of companies use Kubernetes so for those companies, this is great. Downside is I think many companies are not ready to deal with complexity of Kubernetes so system that could put them outside of it might be great. That's just taste I guess.

This is a crowded field so good luck I guess.

Finally, the problem here everyone is trying to solve is skill gap and that's hard to fix with technology. Most devs are bad at Ops and that's where friction comes. It's like watching Product Owner develop their feature using LowCode or AI. It works until it doesn't and when it doesn't, here we go. I also realize few companies want us around since they see as pure money sink.

Most of my frustration around building platforms is lack of communication. Most of it due to developers not understanding or just not thinking about it (See skill issue above) so Ops is forced to put in something ugly to get them into Prod at 11 hour so we don't get tossed under the bus.

[robertkluin]

Awesome feedback, thank you!

The CLI is presently being reworked to expose that capability. Right now, you can use FunctionTest in order to validate that you get your expected outputs from an input. This works well because you can test many scenarios, including error conditions. The CLI does not currently emit the materialized manifests purely because our initial use cases needed to map values from reconciled manifests into other manifests. It is completely viable to emit the materialized manifests though.

Honestly, our ambition is to develop a tool that makes the operations and platform engineering people's lives better. Our team is comprised of software engineers who've worked in the operations and platform engineering space for a long time. It is a crowded space for sure, but I am optimistic, probably foolishly so, that we can develop something that is more pleasant for the platform folks than many of the other options.

We'd welcome any other feedback or thoughts on how to accomplish that.

[tylertreat]

> The CLI does not currently emit the materialized manifests purely because our initial use cases needed to map values from reconciled manifests into other manifests. It is completely viable to emit the materialized manifests though.

Only in cases where the values are statically known, however. If you have resources that depend on the output of another resource, then we can't know that at "template time" as you pointed out.