tanka VS Helm-Chart-Boilerplates

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)

I would point you to what I call the "Universal Helm Charts" and some examples of how to use them.

Shameless Plug: Here's one of my dashboards I made for Ingress-Nginx, which is my recommended border router/gateway into all the services. It adds deep robust metrics and configurability, and if you've got years of experience with Nginx also, it allows you rich complex customization via nginx's configuration structure via kubernetes annotations. Besides that I have open-source helm charts which are easy to use, boilerplates showing how to use them, a volume autoscaler to automatically resize your disks as they get full, and a blog where I share various of my experience which is a companion blog to my upcoming book of the same name. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you have any further questions.

Here is an example of a repo that uses an sub-chart: https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-apache-with-configmap-template/deployment

Use multi-values files with helm ALWAYS. Allowing an env-specific overlay to tweak your default values files. See: https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-echoserver/deployment/boilerplate-echoserver

Helm charts - https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Universal-Kubernetes-Helm-Charts Example using helm charts as sub charts - https://github.com/DevOps-Nirvana/Helm-Chart-Boilerplates/tree/master/boilerplate-echoserver

Helm Chart Boilerplates are examples of usage of the above Universal Helm Charts to help people understand how to use them more, a stop-gap until I add more documentation

Helm Chart Usage Boilerplates (Examples of using these helm chart)

To help you on deploying your service, I've created open source generic/universal Helm Charts to make it easy to do the above. Here are the Universal Helm Charts and here's some boilerplate examples of using them. These built-in have support for HPAs, services, ingresses, etc, making it as easy as autoscaling.enable: true I haven't gotten around to documenting the helm charts yet, but there's lots of comments in the values.yaml file explaining everything.