I agree. Terraform and it's providers are unbelievably powerful for deployments. Being able to create any sort of resource and passing that information onto your kubernetes service to use is really great.

An example would be creating a dynamically names S3 bucket and passing it onto your service to use/manage. The same goes with anything needing credentials. Very powerful.

I usually just deploy "GKE clusters, node pools, AWS route 53, S3 buckets, etc" in terraform. Then take the terraform output and convert it to command line options that I pass to helm when deploying a kubernetes cluster.

I'd be very tempted to just use terraform. But helm, with our forked charts, extensive values.yaml files, etc. has permiated the deployment.

So... rather than try to break up the helm beast; I leave it and keep the separation of concerns (infrastructure vs k8s) as described at the beginning. It works pretty well to be honest is rarely the source of problems.

Something that really helped me convert our helm charts to terraform was this little tool that convert yaml to terraform HCL. I would just render out the helm template and convert it.

Note: It uses the kubernetes terrform provider and only support those objects

https://github.com/sl1pm4t/k2tf/