How do you end up with 200 yaml file “basic deployments” without anyone looking up from their keyboard and muttering “guys what are we doing”?
Honestly they could have picked any stack as next one because the key win here was starting from scratch
This is not that surprising. First, it depends on how big the YAML files were and what was in them. If you have 200 services, I could easily see 200 YAML files. Second, there are non-service reasons to have YAML files. You might have custom roles, ingresses, volumes, etc. If you do not use something like Helm, you might also have 1 YAML file per environment (not the best idea but it happens).
My suspicion is the original environment (47 Kubernetes clusters, 200 YAML files, unreliable deployments, using 3 clouds, etc.) was not planned out. You probably had multiple teams provisioning infrastructure, half completed projects, and even dead clusters (clusters which were used once but were not destroyed when they were no longer used).
I give the DevOps team in the article a lot of credit for increasing reliability, reducing costs, and increasing efficiency. They did good work.
> If you have 200 services, I could easily see 200 YAML files.
Out of curiosity, in what case would you _not_ see 200 files for 200 services? Even with Helm, you'd write a chart per app wouldn't you?
I've seen much-lauded "Devops" or "platform" teams spend two months writing 500+ files for 3 simple python services, 5 if you include two databases.
We could have spent a tiny fraction of that 10-dev-months to deploy something to production on a bare VM on any cloud platform in a secure and probably very-scalable way.
These days I cringe and shudder everytime I hear someone mentions writing "helm charts", or using the word "workloads".
Every guy that joins or starts new project - instead of reading and getting familiar with what is available does his own stuff.
I see this happening all the time and unless you really have DevOps or SysAdmins who are feel acting like 'assholes' enforcing rules it is going to be like that.
Of course 'assholes' is in quotes because they have to be firm and deny a lot fo crap to keep setup clean - but then also they will be assholes for some that "just want to do stuff".
“We want to use one standard Helm chart for all applications but then we need it to support all possible variations and use cases across the whole company”
Can’t fix organisational problems with yaml ;)
But can you fix them with templated yaml?
Just go fully functional document generation languages, make your world there, and forget about the organizational problems.