abstract kubernetes resource deploy tool

Hi Folks,

my company has used helm charts to deploy cloud services before. Operation and maintenance personnel generally reported that the writing of helm charts is too complicated, for example:

go templates

values.yaml is not flexible enough

all the k8s resources needed need to be displayed in templates folder

By browsing multiple helm-related articles, I found that many people do not recommend using helm for internal company business orchestration, but instead use helm to directly reference public charts, such as introducing a standard mysql, redis, etc. The orchestration of internal business still needs to consider simplicity, abstraction and multi-environment differentiation.

Recently, through the study of the kubevela and the definition of cloud native applications such as OAM, I feel this abstract patch approach is more acceptable, so I envision building a set of oamfile tools (the directory structure is similar to helmfile):

├─oamfile.yaml
├─environments
│   └─local.yaml
└─applications
└─app-a
└─application.yaml

# oamfile.yaml

environments:
  local:
    kubeContext: local-k3s
    policies:
      - environments/local.yaml
  dev-cn-shanghai:
    kubeContext: gke-dev
    policies:
      - environments/dev.yaml

applications:

- name: hearing-service
  path: applications/app-a
- name: redis
  url: "oci://ghcr.io/public/redis"
  version: "7.0"

# environments/local.yaml

app-a:
policies:
 - type: override
properties:
components:
  - type: webservice
    properties:
      image: demo:v1
    traits:
      - type: scaler
        properties:
        replicas: 3

# appliactions/app-a/application.yaml

apiVersion:
kind: Application
metadata:
name: demo
spec:
  components:
    - name: demo
    type: webservice
    properties:
      image: demo:v1
    ports:
      - name: http
        port: 9898
        expose: true
    cpu: 2000m
    memory: 100Mi
    volumeMounts:
      emptyDir:
        - name: data
      mountPath: /datacore.oam.dev/v1beta1

Tools like kustomize, it patch resources by jsonPatch which is often very redundant and requires users to clearly understand the Kubernetes resource API. This is not the case with separation of concerns like oamfile. We will abstract out the most commonly used patches, such as set replicas, set volume mounts etc. Unexpected patches will be degraded to jsonpatch.

I'd like to hear your opinions on this idea, or on tools like helm, kustomize, kubevela, etc.