If you install a third-party chart, keep the chart. Its values are the

interface its maintainers support, and for what they do not expose you can

patch the rendered output . This post is about

the other side: the people who write and maintain a chart. What would they

maintain if the same objects came from a Kapitan

inventory and a generator

instead of templates?

To find out, three of the most starred charts on Artifact Hub were rebuilt

as one Kapitan project on the omegaconf backend: metrics-server, cert-manager

and kube-prometheus-stack. The project and the script that compares them

are in

kadet-hub/examples/chart-vs-kapitan ,

and CI runs the comparison on every change.

How the two sides are compared

"Looks the same" is not enough, so the check asks the API server. Both

renderings go through kubectl apply --dry-run=server on a kind cluster,

which applies the defaults Kubernetes adds on its own.…