Sugarkube [1] is an open source alternative to using Ansible for working with Kubernetes clusters. Because it's focussed squarely on Kubernetes, it runs much faster (it's written in Go), but still supports templating & hierarchical variables. It can optionally create clusters (using Minikube, Kops or EKS) as well as install and delete your applications.

When Sugarkube installs your apps, it'll create all the necessary cloud infrastructure you define. It also respects dependencies, so e.g. your Wordpress sites will only be installed once there is a database to back them. You can also choose to only install a subset of your applications (i.e. so you don't need to bother installing the monitoring stack if you just want to work on Jenkins).

Sugarkube can also tear everything down again leaving you with the same clean slate that you started with, so you can use it to spin up and tear down clusters either locally or remotely to your heart's content.

Check out the sample project [2] and accompanying tutorials [3] which demonstrate running a web cluster for a couple of Wordpress sites, and an Ops cluster containing Jenkins, monitoring and Keycloak. Sugarkube supports several advanced use cases, including creating a Kops cluster, installing Keycloak into it, then reconfiguring the Kops cluster to authenticate against the Keycloak instance running inside the cluster. That's all with one command (after you've created a workspace).

I'm happy to answer any questions since I wrote it :-)

[1] https://sugarkube.io

[2] https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project/

[3] https://docs.sugarkube.io/getting-started/tutorials/local-we...