YAML is not declarative, it's a format. Well, according to Wikipedia it's a "data serialization language". IMO It's also bad choice for this, and those files become unreadable and hard to work with.

Agree that shell scripts are also hard to work with, especially if you did not write them yourselves. I guess it's a combo of the language features of, say bash, and that no one who writes them really know bash. I mean, at all. Including me.

Declarative is nice, but also have pros and cons. And, it's of course many ways to achieve this if that's a priority.

Usually, what you really want is: Low time to replicate AND no data loss if a server blows up. But this also have to extend to, say, the k8 cluster. And, again, many ways to achieve this.

The article does not call for Ansible setups and shell scripts though.

Cloud Run uses YAML btw. One of the things I personally don't like about it