Comment by colemannerd

I think this is a great take. I'm on board on the HCL hate - it really reminds me of shoe-horning a templating solution into a complex, code level concern - but just removing YAML is not enough. My one caveat to this is a lot of the "platform engineering" products out there right now seem to want to abstract away all concerns behind a UI, which is just replacing YAML with UI problems. What we really need are open-source, cross-language sdks that allow self serving by developers using the tools they already know, but with additional configuration being able to color that settings by more specialized folks in their areas. For instance, an sdk that lets developers say ram is light, medium, heavy, etc. in whatever language they operate in; followed by a review of the sdk and some additional configuration layered on by the ops folks who monitor the entire company's spend and define what light/medium/heavy is. Too many of the platform engineering "solutions" seem to be about vendor lock-in.