isopod VS kubectl-neat-diff

Tried it[0], worked reasonably well. Be prepared for strong opposition from traditional “devops” folks “who don’t mind yaml” and will drag everyone down.

[0] - https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod

I like Cue and Jsonnet and Starlark and so on. But all of these have very low mindshare (though Starlark has the most momentum thanks to Bazel), and who knows if they will be dead by next year.

Being an early adopter is difficult both in terms of the immaturity of the tooling — Cue, for example, only has a Go implementation at the moment — and in terms of the risk of betting on an evolutionary dead end, which can cause a lot of unnecessary churn when you want to standardize on something across an entire organization.

As a concrete example, I'd love to replace Kubernetes's use of YAML with something like the above. But the tooling is immature, and almost nobody is using any of it. For example, there's Isopod [1], which is a nice-looking tool to use Starlark with Kubernetes. But it might go the same way as Ksonnet.

[1] https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod

Original creator of both of those here. I recommend just generating things out straight with the `jsonnet -m` command, and then doing `kubectl diff` on a PR and apply on merge. Scaled huge amount of infra this way and it’s easily understandable and extensible.

To clean up the diff a bit I recommend using: https://github.com/sh0rez/kubectl-neat-diff

Hope it’s helpful!