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.