Using the helm charts from the community is arguably still doing it alone. There isn't anything back and forth. It's just the right tool for the right job. But,

Using the helm charts from the community is arguably still doing it alone. There isn't anything back and forth. It's just the right tool for the right job. But, this starts being about language and semantics. Like saying that following a best practices on how to configure nginx isn't doing it alone, because someone else wrote that. Helm charts just very often expose what needs to be configured, and otherwise follows those best practices. As for debugging. You do have a point that it becomes more difficult. But, this also holds true for any of the alternatives discussed her (lambdas, terraform). I'd argue that when it all comes down to it, that because you can spin up the entire infrastructure locally on things like minikube, that it makes it many times more easy to debug than other cloud-provider-only solutions.