> then, does anybody actually write pure k8s yaml? You can think of plain k8s yaml as a sort of machine code for k8s. You _can_ write yaml by hand, but it’s no

> then, does anybody actually write pure k8s yaml? You can think of plain k8s yaml as a sort of machine code for k8s. You _can_ write yaml by hand, but it’s not generally how things are done outside of initially learning how k8s works. The tools you’ve mentioned all make working with k8s resources a lot more pleasant. Something simple like parameterizing the name of a secret instead of hardcoding it in N different yaml files saves a lot of time if you ever need to refactor, and being able to provide those values via a “standard” CLI tool makes automated deployments a lot easier compared to hacking together some yq commands. helm in particular tracks the history of any charts you’ve installed, and has a very simple “helm rollback” command which can get you back to the last working version of your application if things end up going wrong. The exact tools used by each team will differ; you could use any of them. But no one in my experience is writing plain yaml manifests and kubectl applying them in production contexts.