For my AKS container setup, I would like to pass the requested number of replicas of a given statefulset to each pod through environment variables.

I was trying to do this without repeating myself (once in the "replicas" setting and once in the setting of the environment variables).

The only real solution I could find of how to do this was using anchors and aliases as such (based on Kubernetes StatefulSet - obtain spec.replicas metadata and reference elsewhere in configuration):

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: solr
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: solr
  serviceName: solr-hs
  replicas: &numReplicas 3
  updateStrategy:
    type: RollingUpdate
  # Make sure pods get created sequentially
  podManagementPolicy: OrderedReady
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: solr
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: kubernetes-solr
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        image: "..."
        resources:
          requests:
            memory: "8Gi"
            cpu: "0.5"
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8983
        env:
        - name: N_O_REPLICAS
          value: *numReplicas

Unfortunately, it seems like the "env" value has to be a string, and the integer value of "replicas" does not get cast or transformed. The following error gets thrown instead:

v1.EnvVar.v1.EnvVar.Value: ReadString: expects " or n, but found 3, error found in #10 byte of ...|,"value":3},{"name":|..., bigger context ...|:"solr-config"}}},{"name":"N_O_REPLICAS","value":3},

I tried casting to a string manually by writing:

value: !!str *numReplicas

But this also doesn't work and throws the following error:

error converting YAML to JSON: yaml: line 52: did not find expected key

Is there any way to create a Kubernetes YAML file that allows the reusing of integer values as strings? Or is there another solution for this particular situation?