Managing Kubernetes configurations at scale inevitably leads to what we call "config hell" - a maze of interconnected Helm charts, Kustomize overlays, and FluxCD manifests that become increasingly difficult to understand, debug, and maintain. Teams spend countless hours troubleshooting why a change in one environment didn't propagate correctly to another, or why a seemingly simple configuration update broke an unrelated service three clusters away.
Consider a real scenario we faced: A routine patch required updating a ConfigMap across 30 instances of Grafana in as many clusters, in 6 environments. What should have been a 10-minute change turned into a 3-day investigation when services started failing in seemingly random patterns. The root cause? Helm template logic interacting with ConfigMap did not take into account spaces in between dashboard names. The configuration files looked correct in Git, but the rendered manifests told a different story.