Saturday, March 28, 2020

One thing manifests and charts should not do, is to rely exclusively on kustomizations to chain ownerships. Those belong in the chart or the operator code which exclusively define the Kubernetes resources. There is an inherent attribute on every Kubernetes resource called ownerReferences that allows us to chain construction and deletion of Kubernetes objects. This is very valuable to the resource because the kube-apiserver will perform these actions automatically. Specifying the chaining together with the resource makes it clear to Kubernetes control plane that these objects are first class citizens that it needs to manage. Specifying it elsewhere leaves the onus on the application not the the kube-apiserver. If there is some logic that cannot be handled via static yaml declarations, then it belongs in the operator code not the charts and the manifests
There are a few advantages to using manifests and charts with custom resources that are self-contained as opposed to those that are provisioned external to the Kubernetes infrastructure via service brokers. When the charts are self-contained, they are completely within the Kubernetes system and accessible for create, update and delete via the kubectl. The kube-apiserver and the operators can take care of the state reconciliation and the system becomes the source of truth. This is not the case with external resources which can have varying degrees of deviation from truth depending on the external service provider.
Resources that are provisioned by service broker can also be kustomized. The charts for these resources are oblivious to the provisioners. It’s the kube-apiserver that determines high provisioners are to be tapped for a resource. This is looked up in the service catalog. The biding between the catalog and the provisioner is a loose one. They can get out of sync but the catalog guarantees a global registry. The manifest and charts work well to describe and define these externally provisioned custom resources

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