kubecfg VS isopod

kubecfg does add some features, like https:// imports, oci:// imports (oci bundles in OCI registries, transitively bundling all imported files with jsonnet-deps).

But yes, I strive to keep the "one file, one target, import whatever you need but explicitly" as much as possible.

I'm pouring some more time into the project and trying to implement some ideas I had for a long time but never managed to get them out. For example "Flags From Files" (https://github.com/kubecfg/kubecfg/blob/flagspec/docs/rfcs/r...) or "Caching + optional vendoring of immutable external deps".

You shouldn't write those manifests by hand in any non-hobby project. https://github.com/kubecfg/kubecfg

Should kubecfg be used instead (having active development)?

We use kubecfg and it is what I would recommend to anyone looking to create a sustainable GitOps workflow at work.

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