> And then there is Helm

Right, who doesn't want to template hundreds of lines of code in a language that uses whitespace for logic and was never made neither for templating nor complex long documents(YAML)? What could possibly go wrong ("error missing xxx at line 728, but it might be a problem elsewhere").

It’s not that bad if you need to deploy at least 3 things and for most cases it beats the alternatives. You can get away with a bootstrapped deployment yaml and a couple of services for most scenarios. What should you use instead? Vendor locked app platforms? Roll out your own deploy bash scripts?

Sure the full extend of Kubernetes is complicated and managing it might be a pain, but if you don’t go bonkers is not that hard to use it as a developer.

I wonder why people don't use fromYaml + toJson to avoid stupid errors with indent.

Yaml is for all intents and purposes a superset of JSON so if you render your subtree as JSON you can stick it in a Yaml file and you don't need to care with indentation.

Honestly, Helm kinda sucks (for all the reasons you mentioned).

But Kustomize is very nice. Although, their docs could be a bit better.

But my infrastructure is code! Can't you see how it's all in git?

What's wrong with having your infrastructure as code and storing it in Git?

YAML isn't code. Same as your reply, YAML has very little awareness of context.

In computer science, the word "code" has a very specific meaning, and markup languages definitely fit this definition.

Nothing. Even if it's objectively terrible (thousands of lines of templated YAML, or thousands of lines of spaghetti bash), being in Git as code is still better. At least you know what it is, how it evolved, and can start adding linting/tests.

I manage large IaC repos and it's mostly HCL, well-structured and easy to work with. Where we have Kubernetes manifests, they're usually split into smaller files and don't cause any trouble as normally we usually don't deploy manifests directly.

"in a language that uses whitespace for logic"

This argument kind of died when python became one of the most popular programming languages used.

Python uses whitespace for scoping - not for logic. That said, the same is true for YAML.

Yeah, but Python has actual for loops.

It’s not completely that white space is bad, but in particular that white space is very difficult to template relative to something character-delimited like JSON or s expressions.

In JSON or s expressions, the various levels of objects can be built independently because they don’t rely on each other. In YAML, each block depends on its parent to know how far it should be indented, which is a huge pain in the ass when templating.

I don’t like helm itself. But I was referring to the deployment part. I like Kustomize more.

I’ve only ever seen a single dev team managing their own K8s cluster. If by deploy you mean “they merge a branch which triggers a lot of automation that causes their code to deploy,” you don’t need K8s for that.

Don’t get me wrong, I like K8s and run it at home, and I’d take it any day over ECS or the like at work, but it’s not like you can’t achieve a very similar outcome without it.

Of course. And I can achieve a Webserver in C. Doesn’t mean it’s the best way given the circumstances.

There are many ways in tech to achieve the same result. I don’t understand why people constantly need to point that out.

I also don’t understand why k8s ruffles so many feathers.

Reminds me a bit of Linux vs windows vs Mac debates.

K8s ruffles my feathers because it’s entirely too easy to build on it (without proper IaC, natch) without having any clue how it works, let alone the underlying OS that’s mostly abstracted away. /r/kubernetes is more or less “how do I do <basic thing I could have read docs for>.”

I’m a fan of graduated difficulty. Having complex, powerful systems should require that you understand them, else when they break – and they will, because they’re computers – you’ll be utterly lost.

Lot's of things are nice to have but are expensive.

I'd love to have a private pool in my backyard. I don't, even though it's nice to have, because it is too expensive.

We intuitively make cost-benefit choices in our private lives. When it comes to deciding the same things at work, our reasoning often goes haywire.

Sometimes we need an expensive thing to solve a real problem.

Your point about object-oriented programming makes sense. Sometimes, a bash script suffices, and the person who decides to implement that same functionality in Java is just wasting resources.

All of these solutions have a place where they make sense. When they are blindly applied because they're a fad they generate a lot of costs.

That’s true. Using k8s to host a static website would be silly.

Generally I only use it when I see a compelling case for it and the introduced complexity takes away complexity from somewhere else.