The Rendered Manifests Pattern: Reveal Your True Desired State - Nicholas Morey, Akuity
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2024-03-20

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The Rendered Manifests Pattern: Reveal Your True Desired State - Nicholas Morey, Akuity

GitOps principles aim to tackle visibility and collaboration challenges in Kubernetes, emphasizing a declarative desired state and continuous reconciliation. While they offer valuable insights, questions arise about Git repo structures, config management tools, and branch strategies. Configuration tools like Helm and Kustomize streamline manifest management but introduce a dilemma. These abstractions are central to GitOps, but changes to them obscure the actual impact on deployed manifests. In GitOps, the true desired state for a Kubernetes cluster is not a Helm chart or Kustomization but the manifests rendered by these tools. Many organizations store abstractions in Git, which can lead to undesirable effects. This talk will introduce the Rendered Manifests pattern to address these problems. It involves rendering manifests via a CI workflow for the main branch of your GitOps repository, ensuring an immutable, unobscured representation of the desired state in Git.