If you would like to do re-use of any service you would just put them inside their own first-class chart in which you'd write the templates directly, rather than going through this layer of indirection, and then copy-paste the small usage portion in your parent chart.
Helm is terrible. It's a bit like bash for kubernetes (string based templating, really??), instead of something strongly typed. This leads to text & obtuse yaml being the way to deploy complex applications to k8s, which leads to bad packaging.
Enforcing some kind of convention in Helm configs is a necessary evil. I see this project as a "contract" on helm configs, much like bitnami is doing (their Helm charts all look alike). It's about as good as bash scripts written in bash that all had a similar case/esac/getopts function to parse arguments.
> Kubernetes is nice but the API is incredibly broad and complicated, overkill for the vast majority of applications. I liked Heroku much better for simple web development.
These are not comparable. You're welcome to use any provider's managed offerings -- Google Cloud Run, AWS Fargate, fly.io, etc.
I'm really sick of people hating on Kubernetes because it's complicated, sure, but the thing it abstracts is far more complicated. When it comes to orchestrating resources across systems nothing comes close.
100% .
> I'm really sick of people hating on Kubernetes because it's complicated, sure, but the thing it abstracts is far more complicated. When it comes to orchestrating resources across systems nothing comes close.
Agreed, and it's elegant at the core. It's just A LOT to take in for most developers. It solves a much bigger problem than Heroku did, but most web devs would just need a simple overlay over a managed k8s offering that doesn't expose all the k8s interfaces.