Eating Your Vegetables - How to Manage 2.5 Million Lines of YAML

Explore a conference talk that delves into the challenges and solutions for managing large-scale Kubernetes configurations. Learn how Intuit handles 2.5 million lines of YAML across 200 clusters, 2500 git repositories, and 9000 namespaces using GitOps. Discover the journey through various configuration management approaches, including templating with Helm, overlays with Kustomize, and codifying with jsonnet and cdk8s. Understand why Intuit ultimately chose Kustomize and how its remote base capabilities enable centralized pattern definition while allowing developer customization. Gain insights into the hard lessons learned in managing YAML at scale and hear predictions about the future of Kubernetes configuration management. Examine the considerations for developers building bespoke applications as a service, focusing on business logic rather than platform details. Analyze different approaches to configuration management, their advantages, and disadvantages, including the challenges of zero configuration reuse, complex templates, and the learning curve associated with various tools. Explore Intuit's case study on automation and migrations, addressing the difficulties of upgrading YAML configurations and managing thousands of pull requests.

1 paloalto NETWORKS
Considerations
Developers • Building bespoke applications as a service • Focused on business logic, and less about platform Want to deploy early and often, don't care about semantic versioning
Affects how you expose the platform to the user e.g. Abstraction v. RAW YAML
Approaches
Nothing to leam Disadvantages: • Zero configuration re-use (umaintainable)
Disadvantages: • Templates become complex and unreadable Examples
Mostly flexible Disadvantages: • Not immediately intuitive . Lack of parameterization makes many use cases harder than necessary
Intuit Case Study
#2 Automation & migrations • YAML is hard to 'upgrade • Thousands of pull requests