YAML works pretty well for the 80% case, I think. I work at Pivotal -- we use YAML so widely in our designs that a few years ago there was a swag t-shirt with t

YAML works pretty well for the 80% case, I think. I work at Pivotal -- we use YAML so widely in our designs that a few years ago there was a swag t-shirt with the title "Enterprise YAML Architect" printed. YAML's shortcomings can be addressed a number of ways. The most recent trends I've seen are: 1. Simplify the YAML itself. This usually means introducing higher-order features that make long, repetitive blocks irrelevant. An example is BOSH v2, which introduced a number of features (Eg. BOSH links) that pushed repetitive scutwork into the tool, away from the YAML manifests. A variant of this is to use more advanced YAMLisms to make your YAML files more concise. Anchors make a big difference. I've seen this be very useful in large Concourse pipelines. 2. Use something that renders down to YAML. For example, Jsonnet[0] or Enaml[1]. Some folks will use templating languages for this purpose (erb, mustache etc). Templating is a last resort, in my view, because it's hard to see what the output will be without rendering it. Plus most tools format nested syntaxes poorly. On the upside, use of a full templating engine introduces opportunities for multi-file DRYing. But that itself should be a smell that the configured tool is missing some feature or capability. 3. Use a different format. TOML appears to be the most popular alternative to YAML and JSON. Most recently I have seen the joint Heroku-Pivotal effort on Buildpacks v3 adopting TOML over YAML or JSON. [0] https://jsonnet.org/ https://jsonnet.org/ [1] https://github.com/enaml-ops/enaml https://github.com/enaml-ops/enaml