First, I'm not sure this question is specific enough for Stack Overflow. Happy to remove or revise if someone has any suggestions.

We use Kubernetes to orchestrate our server side code, and have recently begun using Kustomize to modularize the code.

Most of our backend services fit nicely into that data model. For our main transactional system we have a base configuration that we overlay with tweaks for our development, staging, and different production flavors. This works really well and has helped us clean things up a ton.

We also use TensorFlow Serving to deploy machine learning models, each of which is trained and at this point deployed for each of our many clients. The only way that these configurations differ is in the name and metadata annotations (e.g., we might have one called classifier-acme and another one called classifier-bigcorp), and the bundle of weights that are pulled from our blob storage (e.g., one would pull from storage://models/acme/classifier and another would pull from storage://models/bigcorp/classifier). We also assign different namespaces to segregate between development, production, etc.

From what I understand of the Kustomize system, we would need to have a different base and set of overlays for every one of our customers if we wanted to encode the entire state of our current cluster in Kustomize files. This seems like a huge number of directories as we have many customers. If we have 100 customers and five different elopement environments, that's 500 directories with a kustomize.yml file.

Is there a tool or technique to encode this repeating with Kustomize? Or is there another tool that will work to help us generate Kubernetes configurations in a more systematic and compact way?