Writing controllers that manage other objects is hard. Especially if you want to do:
- server-side-apply (all the cool kids are talking about it)
- proper status reporting through generic object probes
- phased ordering of managed objects (Namespaces need to exist before resources can be put into them; CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs) must be registered before being used; ...)
- Conflict detection (did someone else change an object under my control?)

We'd like to present to you, what we learnt about managing objects using server-side-apply while extracting some functionality of our service-delivery operator "package-operator" into the separate library "boxcutter".