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

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City from November 12 - 15, 2024. Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io 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.