Has Anyone Worked with Kube Resource Orchestrator (KRO)?

As a heavy user of Crossplane, I find KRO more suited for very simple projects. Crossplane manages to leverage data from outside the cluster, which allows complex conditional strategies for deployments based on SLOs and other metrics. If KRO is just a resource packaging tool for one cluster, I don't see enough advantage over shared Helm charts.

In my experience, KRO seems like a half-baked solution trying to offer composition where cloud providers lack native support. Tools like Crossplane already had this figured out! I'm reluctant to invest the time when other tools have better support and functionality for edge cases.

It seems like not many here grasp the concept of KRO. It's more a templating engine to help platform teams simplify the process for downstream developers, rather than a package manager like Helm. It uses the existing Kubernetes API instead of requiring a separate control plane or templating client. Developers can apply KRO abstractions directly with kubectl without needing any extra tools.

I've used KRO for several projects, and I think it has some impressive use cases. Even though it's still early for production, it works really well with custom resource definitions (CRDs) that are dependent on each other, forming a resource graph. For example: - Their web app graph definition is quite robust; teams can easily create a simple app package while letting the platform team manage a single resource instead of many. - I’ve also used it for networking definitions to ensure that certain resources are published before creating others. - Plus, I set up Prometheus instances with federated remote writes to Mimic for observability, which then provisions Grafana resources automatically. KRO is definitely powerful and reduces the knowledge burden when managing these resources.

I have to agree; the lack of loop support is a bummer, and migrating existing resources doesn’t seem possible yet.

I have to say, KRO doesn’t really catch my interest. I’m wondering if you can run it locally to see diffs of changes or manage control over loops and branches during templating—Helm's templating works for me. It seems like it complicates development while trying to simplify deployments.

I actually built a side project called Krombat: a turn-based dungeon RPG fully powered by Kubernetes using KRO. The aim was to create a fun way to teach people about KRO's functionality. There’s no game database or custom server involved; it all runs through KRO's resources and logic. It's been a neat experience pushing KRO's capabilities and even contributed some features back to the KRO project on GitHub!