"Kubernetes manifests are an unnecessarily detailed abstraction for most software developers. Developers don't need as much control. Therefore, they need higher

"Kubernetes manifests are an unnecessarily detailed abstraction for most software developers. Developers don't need as much control. Therefore, they need higher-level abstractions, which hide more detail." Agreed... Though I think there is a different solution. Instead of coming up with all these hardcoded formats and standards (docker-compose, k8s, etc, helm, ansible) which essentially are just 'functions' that map X to Y. Instead of defining 'docker-compose' files, just define the containers itself. And if required, map that to a docker-compose, or k8s manifest or whatever. Remove all these unnecessary layers that aren't really that helpful - because each standard or implementation has it's own parser, error handling etc - why bother with all this? And just use something like Nix for this. Or just define it as a common python value. Otherwise we end up building all sorts of templating and ugly programming-in-yaml. You could take a look at https://docs.hercules-ci.com/arion/#_arion_compose_nix https://docs.hercules-ci.com/arion/#_arion_compose_nix to see what this might look like - uses Nix to do something like docker-compose.