[smetj]

Came here to feel the temperature of the comments, and unsurprisingly, most folks seem to have plenty of gripes with Helm.

A Helm chart is often a poorly documented abstraction layer which often makes it impossible to relate back the managed application's original documentation to the Helm chart's "interface". The number of times I had to grep through the templates to figure out how to access a specific setting ...

[cryptonector]

I don't understand why having to "grep through the templates" is so bad. Oh, I get it, you just want to know what knobs are available for tweaking, and in a well-designed chart those will all be segregated in values files, with overrides specified on the command-line as needed. And so that's what documentation is for, and if a chart does not surface certain knobs from the product, well, yeah, you'll have to modify the chart if you want it to.

What is the essence of the complaint here? That chart authors do poor jobs? That YAML sucks (it does! it so so does!)? Just that charting provides an abstraction you'd rather not have? (If so, why not just... not use Helm?) Something else?

[smetj]

> What is the essence of the complaint here?

As said, that I often cannot relate the managed application's documentation to the Helm chart's interface?

Reason for it can vary ... poor Helm chart documentation, poor Helm chart design, Helm chart not in sync with application releases, ... The consequence is that I often need to grep through its templates and logic to figure out how to poke the chart's interface to achieve what I want. I don't think that's reasonable to say that's part of the end-user experience.

PS: I have no gripes with YAML

[Too]

This. Almost every chart try to be helpful and hide the upstream configuration of the application. Inevitably, you will sooner or later need to change a config. Now it’s not enough to read the documentation of the application, you also need to map this parameter into whatever values the helm chart translated it to. I wouldn’t even call it an abstraction, since it’s only read in a single location, it’s just a dumb and pointless translation. Total nonsense.