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Your DevOps engineering team is designing a continuous delivery pipeline using Google Cloud Deploy and Skaffold to deploy microservices onto Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters across development, staging, and production environments.
You need to implement declarative configuration management using Kustomize that satisfies the following technical requirements:
How should you structure and configure the Kustomize manifests?
base/ directory containing common resource manifests declared in a kustomization.yaml file, and create dedicated overlays/{dev,staging,prod}/ directories where each environment's kustomization.yaml references ../../base under resources and applies declarative patches and transformers.In Kustomize, the base and overlay pattern is the standard declarative configuration pattern for managing Kubernetes manifests across multiple targets. The base/ directory contains standard, environment-agnostic Kubernetes manifests (such as Deployments, Services, and ServiceAccounts) declared inside a kustomization.yaml file. The overlays/ directory contains subdirectories for each deployment target (e.g., dev, staging, prod), each containing its own kustomization.yaml referencing the base.
base/ directory. Updates to shared architecture (such as adding a container port or updating a health check) occur in one place without duplication.namespace, namePrefix, commonLabels, replicas, and resources).{{ .Values }}).kustomize build.This directory structure represents the core architectural design pattern of Kustomize. It cleanly isolates shared application architecture from environment-specific configuration drift while providing continuous delivery engines like Cloud Deploy with deterministic, reviewable rendering boundaries.
base/ directory and execute kustomize build directly against standalone Helm values.yaml files located in each environment directory.This approach attempts to mix packaging paradigms by placing parameterized Go-template Helm charts in the base/ directory and trying to execute kustomize build against raw values.yaml files across environment directories.
kustomize build parses standard, valid Kubernetes YAML resource manifests. It cannot natively parse raw, unrendered Helm Go-templates as base resources without explicit Helm inflation plugins.kustomization.yaml file in each overlay directory to define how resources and patches are merged, rather than standalone Helm values.yaml files.{{ .Release.Name }}).The team explicitly standardized on Helm as their packaging tool, using helm template or Helm-based Cloud Deploy configurations with environment-specific values files.
kustomization.yaml file without overlays, and inject environment differences dynamically at deployment time using Kustomize CLI flags like --set inside the Cloud Deploy pipeline definition.This approach attempts to use a single root manifest set and alter values (such as replica counts, image tags, or resource limits) on the fly by passing key-value arguments directly to the CLI during the deployment execution stage.
kustomize build CLI does not provide arbitrary --set key=value flags to mutate manifest fields at runtime.The deployment architecture used Helm charts where --set parameters are natively supported to override values during chart rendering.
dev/, staging/, and prod/ containing full Kubernetes manifests, and use custom shell scripts with envsubst or sed during pipeline execution to inject environment variables.This approach relies on duplicating entire Kubernetes YAML manifest files across separate environment directories, using placeholder strings (such as ${CONTAINER_MEMORY} or ${REPLICA_COUNT}) that are replaced at runtime by executing command-line utilities like envsubst, sed, or custom shell scripts.
The deployment pipeline strictly mandated legacy shell-based automation on an unmanaged server without the availability of Kustomize, Helm, or modern declarative CD tooling.
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