Comment by decker

After working with declarative systems for some time now (terraform, kubernetes), I've concluded that things will generally be declarative, but you're bound to run into edge cases where the imperative nature of the underlying system bleeds through and shows up as a gotcha for some reason or other. For kubernetes, I've found that people tend to have to name YAML files in the order in which they should be applied for things to work properly. A more devious case involves kubernetes ConfigMaps getting updated in place via apply while the deployment fails to recognize that the environment variables for the pod have now changed and need to be restated. I suppose this could be chalked up to the idea that all declarative systems need to be functional and each resource should be immutable, however, that's never how it evolves in practice. In short, it's all been quite a disillusioning journey through the general promise of not needing to worry about ordering that eventually results in ordering being the hardest problem that the system faces.