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I recently discovered `kustomize` and the `kubectl apply -k` flag (which uses `kustomize`), which makes keeping full manifests pretty straightforward. There's only one or two things I dislike about `kustomize`, but those are things that can be worked around.

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Kustomize has the best local dev environment for k8s that I have found; hot-reloading your cluster as you edit manifests gives a very tight development feedback loop.

For my money it is worth spending the time to grok the slightly funky overlay semantics, at least for teams with infra focus / dedicated SRE.

However, I’m not certain I recommend it for small teams doing full-stack DevOps, I.e. engineers deploying their own code that aren’t k8s experts; if you only work with the Kustomize layer infrequently it can be a bit annoying/unintuitive.

Note you can still use a two-step GitOps process where the Kustomize scripts write to your raw config repo; I think this is a good middle option that keeps the infra legible, while allowing developers to get the ergonomics of a bit of dynamic logic in their deploy pipelines. (Eg parameters for each environment).

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