Manifest explosion

The DevOps team continued their exploration of the underlying operations and requirements for GitOps with Argo CD and Kubernetes. One of the parts they also wanted to understand was the process of onboarding and maintaining the manifests for Argo CD to work correctly. The goal is to make a repeatable, reliable, and scalable process for any current and future applications across the grow cluster size and count.

One of the first things they noticed about the manifest requirements is that every microservice required its own helm chart. Additionally, to add overrides files for different environments, the override files would have to reside in the same repository as the chart for Argo CD to leverage them. This Argo CD requirement meant that the DevOps team would have to maintain the core helm chart for every microservice and work through a pull request approval process for every chart or values file change on every microservice.

Because of this, the DevOps team...