Complexity clock, requirements, and patterns

The configuration complexity clock is a concept that explains how configuration management can become complex over time. It explores different stages in the evolution of configuration management, its use cases, and its pitfalls. It was initially discussed from the perspective of application configuration in the blog post found here: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity-clock.html. We will look at the same concept from the Kubernetes configuration management perspective.

The configuration complexity clock

Let’s say we are deploying our first application workload into Kubernetes. To start with, every Kubernetes artifact, such as Deployment, Service, and Ingress, can be managed as individual configuration artifacts. It may not be an issue when we operate on a tiny scale. But soon we will realize that there is an issue with consistently performing releases and rollbacks as the application configuration...