kapitan VS tanka

https://github.com/kapicorp/kapitan is also a very powerful option for managing and generating templates.

There's a reason that other tooling is taking different approaches. Visual workflows help for understanding existing manifests - but they'd be horrible for creating/modifying new ones.

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)