Chapter 8: Knowing the Trade-offs

In the previous few chapters, we learned a lot about Crossplane, from its basics to many advanced patterns. Also, we introduced the idea of a unified approach to both application and infrastructure automation. This chapter will step back to analyze and approach configuration management for unified automation holistically. The chapter is heavily influenced by the white paper Declarative application management in Kubernetes (https://goo.gl/T66ZcD) by Brian Grant, a Kubernetes Steering Committee emeritus. The white paper mainly covers the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM). We will cover the topics in this chapter from the KRM and Crossplane Resource Model (XRM) perspectives. The chapter will define the scope of the unified automation approach. It will continue by looking into many more concepts, such as the tools available, common pitfalls along the way, and the trade-off in using different patterns. In a way, it’s a revisit of the API boundaries...