Over seven years of using a variety of deployment tooling including helm (2 and 3), kustomize and our own scripting we concluded that helm's strength is as a package manager, akin to dpkg. Writing good packages is complex, but the tool is quite powerful if you take the time to do that. For our own deployments what we typically want to to do is: build, test and push an image, plug some context specific things into yaml, send the yaml to the control plane and maybe monitor the result for pod readiness. We have some custom tooling that does this in gitlab pipelines, relying on kustomize for the yaml-spattering bits. We still do use a lot of our own and third-party helm charts but for us there's a clear distinction between installing packages (which tend to be longer-term stable infra things) and rapidly iterating on deployments of our own stuff.
Any advice/ideas/articles/references on using kustomize efficiently?
I love the idea of using a tool bundled with kubectl for zero dependencies, but their examples and tutorials are horrible. I can't figure out how to use it correctly to have 1 copy of YAML that would deploy to 5 different environments. It seems I would need multiple copies of kustomization.yaml in multiple folders, if I have multiple namespaces/pods/etc...
The model is base yaml with patches applied to it results in final yaml that get sent to the api, so the typical structure for us is to have the base yaml live with the service source, be maintained by the service owners and include all environment-agnostic properties. We then have one folder per targeted environment for that service which includes any patches and the kustomization.yaml manifest. Basically in line with what other replies have mentioned.
We use kustomize with multiple copies of kustomization.yaml and I don't know if there is a way to do it without that. Basically, there's a base kustomization.yaml and then there's test/kustomization.yaml, prod1/kustomization.yaml, prod2/kustomization.yaml, and so on.
