metacontroller VS terraform-cdk

It worth adopt proper controller development with something like Metacontroller, Kopf or Java Operator SDK.

There are many frameworks, like the Operator Framework (https://operatorframework.io/) to the MetaController (https://github.com/metacontroller/metacontroller) to KubeBuilder(https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubebuilder) to the Kubernetes Operator Framework (kopf, https://kopf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), among others.

You might like a little alternative to writing your own in the first instance:) take a look at https://metacontroller.github.io/metacontroller/

Codegen is not magic, but if you want to make it simple stupid, supportable and prod-usable I'd go for metacontroller. There's not much magic to it - just common admission/validation webhooks propagated to your controller implementation, alongside the simplest possible reconciliation cycle. We had adopted Knative driven metacontrollers and it's a pretty solid approach.

https://github.com/metacontroller/metacontroller - Sounds cool! I will look into it.

When I need a quick mutating controller, I like to use MetaController, which makes rapid prototyping really easy: https://metacontroller.github.io/metacontroller/

If you are more into lightweight and common use cases, look at metacontroller or the shell-operator.

In case you've not heard of it, the metacontroller aims to do exactly this. It provides the controller-lifecycle (registering your types, watching the API for changes, etc), you just need to provide a HTTP webhook to receive the JSON object, and respond with the modifications\resources you want.

At first I tested it to deploy an OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Service (MKS) with a Node Pool. And step by step, it worked. I even created a Pull Request (PR) in the terraform-cdk repository to add it as an example ☺️.

I'll be trying more sample app deployments with CDK and maybe even explore CDK for Terraform.

You can use CDK with other providers using https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk

In my experience, CDK is far better than Pulumi, especially if you're mostly going to be using AWS.

I, personally, prefer Crossplane Composite Functions on top of CDK8S, but had dropped CDKTF due to bloat. You can actually manage Kubernetes updates/upgrade lifecycle with Crossplane, as well.

I was going to recommend Pulumi, but looks like CDK for Terraform is still being kept up to date.

Avoid Pulumi, get directly to source and use https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk