carvel VS tanka

You should take a look at Carvel maybe something in it could match with your needs.

There's a third option that's quickly rising in popularity, which is Carvel, works great for smaller teams, and allows progressive adoption since it can start as CLI for newer teams learning about gitops concepts.

Carvel (carvel.dev) — featured in opening keynotes.

Huge fan of Carvel tools, it's a whole bunch of them that can help with a wide array of use cases, grab one or two of them for a given scenario, or adopt a bunch that string together to solve larger problems.

+1 been using ytt and kapp, the Carvel stuff in its entirety is a much better experience than helm (it can keep helm to help migration, or deal with the fact everyone still distributes in helm).

Creating Carvel Community which :

https://carvel.dev (and especially the [KAPP](https://carvel.dev/kapp/) piece) is a set of excellent tools to level up on Kubernetes.

Take a look at Kapp on https://carvel.dev/ for this, possibly.

Hopefully this post has helped you make install process smoother, smarter, and made you discover CARVEL tools.

I would recommend implementing a similar API to Grafana Tanka: https://tanka.dev

When you "synthesise", the returned value should be an array or an object.

1. If it's an object, check if it has an `apiVersion` and `kind` key. If it does, yield that as a kubernetes object and do not recurse.

Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).

Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/

A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet

- validation is often impractical (at least identifying exactly where the error is… I’m looking at you Helm!)

Unrelated to OP, but you can leverage Tanka to extend helm charts with functionality not provided by upstream.

https://tanka.dev/

Although jsonette might be considered more complex Tanka is a great alternative for k8s config management.

At Grafana Labs we're using jsonnet at scale, while being a powerful functional language it is also excellent for rendering JSON/YAML config. We have developed Tanka[0] to work with Kubernetes, for other purposes I can recommend this course[1] (authored by me).

[0] https://tanka.dev/

[1] https://jsonnet-libs.github.io/jsonnet-training-course/

If you're hitting the limits of Kustomize, maybe look at Tanka as well.

Yes, try Tanka.

yes. basically. and this is a path that multiple people are trying to solve. e.g. AWS CDK8s, https://tanka.dev/, etc

Compose would be awesome.

http://tanka.dev

(Note I work for Grafana Labs who fund Tanka and use it for all production config)