Need advice on helm charts vs manifests based deployments
Helm can do multiple things for you:
- template k8s manifests - similar to what Kustomize is currently doing in your setup
- take care about upgrading installations - that includes removing deletes resources
- keep track of revisions of your installations - so you can rollback easily
- allow you to add helmcharts to your application as a dependency - so your application chart will also include mysql and redis for example - all managed in one place and deployed together
- define chart for default microservice (with monitoring, ingress config etc) with extensive configuration options and use it across most of the teams in your company
- etc
Looks like the last point matches your demand quite a lot, since you have many applications from multiple teams.
I think helm with reusable charts a great next step from raw k8s manifests.
Also you can define tests to be executed to validate the release.