Sorry I didn't see this sooner! The repetition is definitely something that bothered me in the early working versions of our app on kubernetes, and also the general lack of reproducibility and manual fiddling that might be required to make changes or create new services, and the difficulty of having the configuration live in the code so it can change on a per branch basis, and have that branch built correctly by CI when it goes to QA/staging.
ky is definitely still just in the "maybe useful/maybe practical" territory, but now that the basic concept of compiling from a Procfile seems to work, I suspect adding some configuration and more environment aware and extensible/overrideable templating could make it pretty practical, but I also had/have my eye on Helm. There may be some practical/logistical complications in using Helm, and I think if we went that way we'd probably go full hog and use Deis Workflow (https://deis.com/workflow/), which also deserved mention in this thread's discussion, but the k8s clients like the python one you point to or the ruby one (https://github.com/abonas/kubeclient) may be worth bringing into the mix depending on how this all works out... Thanks for the links and for having a look!