[KGunnerud]

I've seen different aproaches to controllers, some times it should have been a generator instead, but the problem with generators is that they don't allow (in the same sense) for abstractions at the same level of controllers.

E.g. at one company I worked, they made a manifest to deploy apps that, in v1 was very close to Deployment. It felt owerkill. As they iterated, suddenly you got ACLs that changed NetworkPolicy in Calico (yes can be done with generator), then they added Istio manifests, then they added App authroizations for EntraID - Which again provisioned EntraID client and injected certificate into pods. All I did was add: this app, in this namespace, can talk to me and I got all this for "free". They code in the open so some of the documentation is here: https://docs.nais.io/explanations/nais/

One day, they decided to change from Istio to LinkerD. We users changed nothing. The point is, the controller was 2 things: 1: for us users to have a golden path and 2: for the plattform team themselves to have an abstraction over some features of kube. Although I do see that it might be easy to make poor abstractions as well, e.g. just because you don't create a Deployment (its done for you), you still have to own that Deployment and all other kube constructs.

I'm currently in a org that does not have this and I keep missing it every, every day.