I wonder what the need for tools such as this or other "Kubernetes-by-example" type pages tell us about the complexity of configuring Kubernetes resources.

Do we need a better layer of abstraction, i.e. better adoption and tighter integration for something like kustomize? Have we fucked up completely with Kubernetes due to it being outrageously complicated for simple tasks? How we redesign this to be simpler? Is the complexity even a problem for the target audience?

I've no idea. I just know I'm a kubernetes admin and I can't write a deployment yaml without googling or copy/pasting.

I think of Kubernetes as "the new Operating System", and these complex resources as fiddling with initscripts, fstab, /etc/interfaces, and so on. Writing an operator is like writing your own initscript.

I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see new abstractions for "you just want a plain 'ol deployment with CI/CD du jour, a persistent volume claim, and a service ingress, just like 90% of all other CRUD webapps? Sure, here's a simple resource for that."

I think we'll start seeing a move towards more "opinionated" tools, just to outsource some of the decision making. No sense learning how to write your own pipelines if you can find a tool that says "we're gonna deploy every time you make a git tag and run `mvn package`, you figure the rest out".

Helm has been doing this since the early days. 99% of our charts are created using:

* `helm create` to get the default scaffold

* modify a handful of entries in the generated values file

* done!

Only thing is the default helm chart starter does not allow for autoconfiguring of volumes, and since we're porting a lot of stateful apps to kubernetes we just modified the default starter to include that capability.

Of course it would be nice to not have to maintain a bunch of different virtually identical templates.

Pulumi looks interesting but unfortunately seems to insist on vendor lock-in (see the jerk-around on https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/2697). So I'm looking forward to the AWS CDK (https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/) maturing a bit.

As someone attempting to port a docker-compose application to a Helm chart I'd love to hear more about the resources you used. As someone working with a very simple application I've found the processes to be more difficult than I anticipated.