My point is though that using string templating for YAML creation is IMO always a bad idea and using helm for anything more complicated than the most basic application always makes me sad in the end. helmfile adds another templating layer and my limited exposure to it made me really dislike it.
edit: I remember now that this was for rendering config for vector, which itself has templating support with the famous `{{ .key }}` syntax. So not entirely helmfile's fault, but I still stick to my point as I needed to get through 3 levels of templating.
Of the config, not of reality. What if someone made a change in the meantime? Or something is in a half or fully broken state?
> And it’s all templated so could be dynamic.
Not dynamic based on things external to that Helm deployment. You can't have two Helm charts referencing each other dynamically, or anything else external for that matter.
IMO using string templating for creating structured data in a white-space sensitive configuration language always ends with pain and cursing beyond the most basic application manifests. I'm not saying Terraform or HCL is necessarily the solution either but it certainly wouldn't be Helm in my book.
It's a shame language like CUE or nickel didn't take off for this.
I also somewhat wish that k8s was programmed with something like the CDK where I could get a nice understandable compiler error about what went wrong and why. But for the most part I'm spending very little time writing helm charts and a lot more time writing my applications. A tweak here or there to the chart has to happen, but that's relatively minor and easy to accomplish.
