Yeah, I replaced a custom resource patching solution with Kustomize. I was very concerned my custom solution would inhibit on-boarding, and wasn't thrilled with Helm. Back in November I was pretty happy when I stumbled across Kustomize, it claimed to do exactly what I wanted it to do. In reality there were a few hiccups, but it's certainly moving in the right direction.

Granted, I still do have a bunch of "opinionated" scripts, but they delegate the heavy lifting to Kustomize, and all the configuration itself is just stock-standard k8s resources.

Thanks for the pointer to jkcfg. Our helm chart templates are getting too complex for the tooling and it's making me wish we were using a more powerful programming environment. One where we could reuse code more easily across projects. We could still write our configuration code in a declarative style, that's a matter of code structure.

I do like helm's interface around packages: install, upgrade and test. I like that packages have a tree structure that you can compose (if you opt to do so). It'd be nice to extend the interface further to have other common actions you could apply to a more advanced package (e.g. backup, restore, chaos test, add tenant, remove tenant, etc).