[zikohh]

Have you tried the rendered manifests pattern ? https://akuity.io/blog/the-rendered-manifests-pattern/

[granra]

I read this article a while ago and it seems like the most sane way of dealing with this. Which tool you use to render the manifests doesn't even matter anymore.

[rorychatt]

While I agree generally with the pattern (dynamically generating manifests, and using pipelines to co-ordinate pattern change), I could never quite figure out the value of using Branches instead of Folders (with CODEOWNER restrictions) or repositories (to enforce other types of rules if needed).

I can't quite put my finger on it, but having multiple, orphaned commit histories inside a single repository sounds off, even if technically feasible.

[theptip]

I believe the idea is that it makes it very explicit to track provenance of code between environments, eg merge staging->master is a branch merge operation. And all the changes are explicitly tracked in CI as a diff.

With directories you need to resort to diffing to spot any changes between files in folders.

That said there are some merge conflict scenarios that make it a little annoying to do in practice. The author doesn’t seem to mention this one, but if you have a workflow where hotfixes can get promoted from older versions (eg prod runs 1.0.0, staging is running 1.1.0, and you need to cut 1.0.1) then you can hit merge conflicts and the dream of a simple “click to release” workflow evaporates.

[appplication]

Interesting, we have a system (different context, though it does use yaml) that allows nested configurations, and arrived at a similar solution, where nested configs (implicit/human interface) are compiled to fully qualified specifications (explicit/machine interface). It works quite well for managing e.g. batch configurations with plenty of customization.

I was unaware there was a name for this pattern, thank you.

[nijave]

This pattern is powerful since you can pick arbitrary tooling and easily make modifications with your own tooling. For instance substituting variables/placeholders or applying static analysis.