2026-02-02, 14:50–15:15, B.3.0.32
Debugging Kubernetes YAML can be frustrating, especially when wrestling with missing line breaks or maintaining hundreds of lines of curly template brackets. Fortunately, there are alternative approaches to declaring complex infrastructures with more suitable programming languages! In this talk, I’ll present how CDK8s can be used to enhance your Infrastructure as Code organization and share valuable tips we gleaned during our migration journey within the Datadog Alerting team.
Kubernetes manifests, traditionally written in plain YAML or templated with systems like Kustomize and Helm, presented significant challenges for Datadog's Alerting team. With hundreds of applications deployed constantly, these methods proved inefficient for expressing complex needs, leading to maintenance difficulties, a lack of out-of-the-box validation, and insufficient testing capabilities. The team often spent excessive time on development and debugging, even causing incidents due to templating errors and inadequate validation.
Our Automation team needed a solution to manage charts and system complexity across cloud providers, features, scale, and sharding. Adopting a programming language-based approach became essential. This would facilitate chart generation, enable robust testing, promote efficient code sharing, and offer an easier onboarding experience for developers. CDK8s provides precisely this solution: an open-source framework, renders Kubernetes manifests directly from languages like Javascript, Python, Java, and Go.
This presentation will introduce CDK8s concepts and showcase its practical application within the Datadog Alerting team. Attendees will gain insights into managing infrastructure complexity using CDK8s, drawing from our team's experience. We will detail our transition from Helm templates and propose reusable patterns for enhancing DevOps infrastructure declaration.
Benjamin is a Software Engineer at Datadog, a leading observability and security SaaS platform. He simplifies development and deployment workflows for developers working on the Alerting product, simplifying their tasks and the management of their services. Prior to this, he worked at Ubisoft, utilizing technologies like Ansible to facilitate the deployment of OpenStack and other infrastructure technologies.