I really like k8s itself and I think these yaml files are a great API layer, but the way people produce these files nowadays (templating systems and a lot of glue like helm) is a joke and in a real, even mildy complex environment becomes a terrible mess really quickly. What I really want is a typed programming language, where using normal code we describe how to produce all these yaml-described k8s resources using whatever abstractions make sense in our business.
Twitter thread I had about it a while ago: https://twitter.com/dpc_pw/status/1182022825361625088
> What I really want is a typed programming language, where using normal code we describe how to produce all these yaml-described k8s resources using whatever abstractions make sense in our business.
This is more or less exactly what we’re working on at Pulumi. Using a language like TypeScript to describe Kubernetes infrastructure provides a nice mix of simple JSON-like resource definition, strong typing, and the ability to use variables, loops, functions, classes, packages, test frameworks, and more from an expressive general purpose programming language. You still have access to the full fidelity of the raw Kubernetes API, but also all the tools you need to apply proper software engineering on top of it.
This had to be pointed out; Pulumi's docs repeat the adjective "real", as if its competitors aren't real. "real code", "real package management" [2], "real languages" [3], "real programming model" [4]... Nix and Dhall are quite real, though. So is this an incomplete survey, or are Pulumi's docs unrealistically self-aggrandizing? TBH even just this one paragraph of yours is pretty tough to stomach, as if loops and functions in a configuration language were a novel concept.
[0] https://github.com/xtruder/kubenix
[1] https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes
[2] https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/vs/k8s_yaml_dsls/