This post is WIP.

Introduction

This is a first post in a series to look for my choice of tooling to manage Deployments in a K8S (Kubernetes) cluster.

In this post, we will look at how to use Kustomize to create a development + production deployment.

What is Kustomize

If you want to join YAML files together for multiple environments, and like using straight up kubectl, look no further than Kustomize.

Kustomize’s power comes from its simplicity. It doesn’t manage state, doesn’t handle type safety, or even powerful templating.

It is purely a data structure merger. Want to merge 2 objects? Merge lists? Override lists? Merge nested data structures? Kustomize probably has a solution for you.

One of the major benefits when reading/learning about Kustomize, is that it’s part of the K8S SIGs (Special Interest Group). Freebie benefit right of the bat!

How to use it - High Level Overview

A simple interface is presented to the user:

# Tell Kubectl this is an API object to be handled by kustomize, of version /1beta1
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
# The kind of the API Object, references which schema to use when validating.
kind: Kustomization

# A list of base files to pull in.
# Can also be a directory full of YAML files
bases:
  - ./base
# A list of YAML files to patch.
patchesStrategicMerge:
  - ... # We don't talk about Hugo yet