In general, I've found CI/CD templates, IAC templates and app templates to be an anti-pattern. It goes to the heart of scalable vs replicable.
> Put simply: something replicable can be copy-pasted (with variations as needed) to grow impact linearly in relation to effort and cost. Something scalable can create impact at a rate that increases faster than the rate at which your effort and costs increase.
In the contexts I've worked in, templates enabled us to rapidly grow and expand our business and technology in unmaintainable ways.
We scaled to 100 services, but our revenue and headcount didn't scale linearly to support the services over time.
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In general, I lean towards solutions that facilitate distributing and updating templates over solutions that facilitate copying/pasting templates.
- Kubernetes this meant a common Helm service chart for the organization -- Now we could distribute and update kubernetes manifests to the org - CICD this meant building plugins that we distributed to teams - Application templates I've historically moved folks back into monoliths but the microservice chassis pattern looks like a solution here -- https://microservices.io/patterns/microservice-chassis.html
Your calculus might look different depending on your internal capabilities and resources. Good luck!