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by skboosh 2749 days ago
I've been working on something similar with sugarkube[1]. It looks like it takes a different approach and aims to solve more of the toolchain. I'd be interested in feedback if anyone has the time...

[1]https://github.com/sugarkube/sugarkube
1 comments
nprateem 2749 days ago
Can you elaborate? It's not completely clear from the README.
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skboosh 2749 days ago
Imagine you're running Wordpress on K8s. It actually needs ingress, Cert Manager for SSL certs and a DB. Locally you might want to use MariaDB for convenience, but in the cloud you want to use RDS.

Sugarkube lets you install everything in a single pass. In this example you'd create several different bundles (MS call them CNABs, I call them kapps to disambiguate them from apps which is an overloaded term). You'd create one for nginx ingress, one for cert manager, and one for wordpress. But the wordpress one is parameterised differently per environment to either create a MariaDB when running locally or RDS when running in the cloud. These bundles are just stored in a git repo.

Under the hood, Sugarkube calls Make with some predefined targets - right now just install, but in future also destroy - and passes a bunch of environment variables that the kapp declares that it needs. These can be loaded from a hierarchical YAML configuration which Sugarkube reads (kind of like hiera/puppet does). Oh, and it can template files as well.

'Make' just calls whatever you've implemented - Helm, terraform, any non-k8s stuff you need (there's no dependency on K8s in the architecture). You can easily drop down and ignore Sugarkube and just work directly with tools you already know.

Sugarkube also lets you control which versions of which bundles to release to your environments. It can support multiple live environments.

A final thing is it can also spin up clusters on a variety of backends - minikube, kops, and in future EKS/AKS/GKE, etc.

So altogether Sugarkube gives you a complete solution for launching clusters (ephemeral if you like), and installing your dependencies into them (all as a single golang binary).

Check out the example project (https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project) which launches a minikube cluster, installs nginx-ingress, cert manager and 2 wordpress instances backed by MariaDB, and then loads different sample data into both databases.

It's still in preview but it can solve a real pain point around working with K8s and deploying applications.

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