Vanilla k8s is pretty good. But once the 8 trillion vendors have you 'curl | helm' ing you end up with a knot of a system.

Keep it simple, use GitOps (ArgoCD is great), let k8s do what it's good at, managing workloads, not as a delivery mechanism for a vendor.

As an aside, the existence of the '{{ | indent 4 }}' function in helm should disqualify it from any serious use. Render, don't template.

I don't understand this comment. How else are you going to deploy pieces of k8s infra into k8s if not with Helm and Helm Charts? Sure, you can use Argo to deploy and sync Helm charts into k8s but...you're still going to be using Helm (if not indirectly via Argo) and you will inevitably need to template things that need to be dynamically configured at render-time.

> How else are you going to deploy pieces of k8s infra into k8s if not with Helm and Helm Charts?

kubectl apply -f $MANIFESTS

> you're still going to be using Helm (if not indirectly via Argo) and you will inevitably need to template things that need to be dynamically configured at render-time.

Use Kustomize for dynamic vars and keep it at a minimum. Templating is the root of all evil.

Helm mostly adds unnecessary complexity and obscurity. Sure it's faster to deploy supporting services with it, but how often do you actually need to do that anyway ? The time you're initially gaining by using Helm might generate an order of magnitude more time in maintenance later on because you've created a situation where the underlying mechanics are both hidden and unknown from you.

> kubectl apply -f $MANIFESTS

How do you configure it? Like you're installing new version, do you go over manifests and edit those by hand over and over every update? Do you maintain some sed scripts?

helm is awesome because it separates configuration.

But for Kubernetes manifests specifically, the right tool for the job is Kustomize[1] (which in that case does what Helm does for you, keeping dynamic variables separate). It ships with kubectl and I'm a big believer in using default tools when possible.

> Like you're installing new version, do you go over manifests and edit those by hand over and over every update?

I check the patch notes, diff the configuration files to see if anything new popped up, do the required changes if necessary, jump the version number and deploy.

It sounds laborious but it's really not that much work most of the time, and more importantly it forces you to have a good sense for what and how everything works. Plus it allows you to have a completely transparent, readable environment. Both are important for keeping things running in a production environment. Otherwise you might find yourself debugging incomprehensible systems you've never paid attention to in the middle of the night with 2 hours left before traffic starts coming in.

[0]: https://github.com/mikefarah/yq

[1]: https://kustomize.io