Comment by 80fj0348i | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 80fj0348i | Hacker News Reader

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> The only time an infra engineer would trust the types is if the vendor themself supplied them, or there's a mainstream community effort to keep them up to date

Good news! The Kubernetes project has a documented compatibility strategy (https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/kubernetes-api/...) and publishes new client library versions for every release. There's endpoints in the API to interrogate the API's versions and supported fields/features for every resource. Additionally, most API types will accept old versions and automatically convert them to the newer versions, wherever this is possible.

> At the end of the day, the API takes a string, not some protobuf or CORBA or God knows what binary serialized monster dujour...

This is not necessarily correct. Kubernetes API supports JSON, YAML, protobuf or CBOR over the wire, and all become in-memory structs on the server.

Kubernetes is a decent example of vendor-supplied and/or mainstream community effort, but that's beside the point that (a) Kubernetes is the exception, not the rule, and (b) Helm is popular for other reasons that belie non-string wire options, like: value overlays (how would you overlay binary-serialized CBOR again?), type safety for the stringly-typed JSON/YAML passed over the wire powered by validating admission webhooks, remote-executed-on-the-cluster hooks for pre-/post- installs/upgrades/uninstalls (big help for database migrations, for example, which cannot be connected to from the machine running Helm), etc.

Everything you mentioned as a Helm feature is not in fact exclusive to Helm, and can be done either in code using the client libraries, or other deployment tools. For example I've written my own deployment tools that provide "value overlays" by simply merging the in-memory structs in Python or Go code - a manifest is just a data structure. I've also written code that can do ordered deployments with checks at multiple stages, which is both easier to do and more powerful when you write Python/Go code than trying to twist your dependencies to fit Helm's sync wave system.

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