Amazing how people are complaining while proposing shit solutions. Seems like nobody is doing infra seriously there.
The alternatives of helm are not that interesting to me: I still have nightmare when I had to use jsonnet and kustomize just for istio, with upgrade hell.
So I am sticking to helm as it feels way straight forward when you need to change just a few things from an upstream open source project: way fewer lines to maintain and change!
When you look into all the complaints one by one they are exceptionally acurate.
* yaml has its quirks. - check
* text templating can’t be validated for spec comformity - check
* helm has lot’s of complexity - check
* helm has dependency problems - check
* helm charts can have too many moving parts with edge cases causing deep dive in the chart - check
Helm is not just a templating engine to provide kubernetes manifests. It’s an application deployment and distribution ecosystem. Emphasis on the "ecosystem".
* It brings dependency management,
* It provides kubernetes configuration management.
* It provides abstraction over configuration to define applications instead of configuration.
* It provides application packaging solution.
* It provides an application package manament solution.
* There is community support with huge library of packages.
* It’s relatively easy to create or understand charts with a varied experience level. A more robust and strictly typed templating system would remove at least half of this spectrum.
* The learning curve is flat.