Indeed, the goal has to keep the number of moving parts down as much as possible so it can be easy to understand the full cluster and how to troubleshoot it. But of course, it still requires knowledge about the architecture to do so.
How was your experience writing that much Bash code?
I wonder what tools there are, currently (I noticed it's in beta), to get an overview of the state of the cluster, maybe what is talking to what, how much bandwidth they use etc (I don't know what one would need to know)
Thanks for asking :)
Writing this much Bash is quite straining because there is a lot of typing, but it is also liberating in the sense of coding very close to the OS (utils).
Also, most of it is not written in Bash, it's written in Posix standard, which is even more spartanic, but is then compatible with Dash and Ash (BusyBox) also, which is good because Bash is not always available.
To make Simplenetes we used another tool we also created which is meant for writing shell script apps and to perform agent-less automation, it is called Space.sh [1]
About tools for getting an overview of the cluster, there is only the command line tooling as for now, which does parts of the job, but tools for analyzing traffic and such is not created yet.