Readit NewsIt would be great if there were some docs on how to integrate Hyscale with, for example, a Github action to enable enable deployment on a push to master. It wouldn't be too difficult for me to set up, but having a "right way" to do it written by the maintainers would give me much more confidence.
It would be a killer app if you are.
The HyScale spec schema itself is available at the companion repo here: https://github.com/hyscale/hspec
Whereas the same service can be described in hyscale spec using a few dozen lines. But it's not just about the number of lines, the HyScale hspec is defined in terms of higher-level app-centric entities that are intuitive to most developers.
You also get simpler troubleshooting of deployment errors and worry less about having to maintain compatibility of your K8s manifest yamls with each new K8s version.
Yes, this makes it easier to get started -- but when something goes wrong, now you have to hunt down bugs in two layers of software. And, since you've intentionally isolated yourself from the underlying layer, you have less experience with it!
This is why I like Helm. If you write your charts well, you can write your k8s yaml once, and do the things you need to do on a daily basis by adjusting your chart values
Helm does require understanding of all the underlying low-level objects defined in Kubernetes. HyScale hopes to provide higher-level entities to deal with, as well as providing ways to do higher-level ops & deployment introspection. We believe it should be possible to satisfy the needs of a reasonably large number (>80%) of apps.
Questions:
1. How do you deal with the mutability of K8s resources? Do you assume people won't change the underlying resources that you generate, or do you keep k8s controllers running to ensure there's no deviation?
2. How understandable is your generated output to humans? Do users have a way to go "backwards" through your abstraction? (Since your tool lives in an ecosystem with many other kubernetes tools, your users will sometimes end up having to deal with the generated output, since other tools operate at the K8s level such as prometheus, log aggregators etc)
3. Do you interoperate with K8s-level resources well? Do _all_ my services need to be in this abstraction for this to work well? e.g. Can my hyscale yaml reference a non-hyscale service for any reason? Or are they essentially two separate worlds?
Answers to your Questions:
1. The expectation is that people deploying through hyscale don’t want to go and modify K8s resources directly on the cluster behind the scenes. If they do, then it either deviates from the hspec files in git or they have parallel K8s yamls which won’t make much sense either. As of now, hyscale deploys and doesn’t keep anything (eg. controller) running, But it's a good suggestion to keep the K8s resources in sync with the desired state (hspec) and we’ll certainly put some thought into it.
2. HyScale outputs standard K8s manifest yamls which are as readable as any well hand-coded. On the other hand, if there was a way to generate back hspec files from existing K8s yamls, would that be interesting/useful?
3. Suppose you have K8s resources/snippets already written for some of your services, you can refer to them in hspec and add application context to it and make use of profiles for environment variations. If the question is more about off-the-shelf services (eg postgres, redis, etc), we have helm chart support coming up. https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Roadmap#2-ots-off-th...
HyScale generates standard K8s manifest yamls from hspec as you would write by hand, and in that sense it is portable as well and doesn’t hide the underlying yamls if you really wanted to see. Our experience shows that for several apps, one doesn’t really need to dig down below. Especially in the case of large teams, you may still want one or two people who understand the underlying mechanism (just as Angular developers may understand underlying JS mechanisms), but everyone else can simply move faster and easier.