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by drewcoo
1063 days ago
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> he structure and syntax for AWS is entirely different from Azure is entirely different from GCP This! We're essentially writing locked-in vendorscript. What we want is an actual infrastructure language. One that lets us write once and deploy anywhere (nods to Java). That would also allow us to standardize the way additional tooling (monitoring, logging, etc.) hooks into everything. It would allow us to easily deploy to new environment types as they become available (I keep hearing about the wonders of WASM). It would allow standardized ways of doing ops testing. |
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I know it's super unpopular in these parts but a lot of what the article asks for is satisfied by conventional statically typed OOP (with inheritance), and other features common in full blown programming languages. You don't have to actually do the setup imperatively, but you can construct the data structures describing what you want with such tools and let some engine bring your real infrastructure into compliance.
That's why the author is experimenting with TypeScript.
Obviously, full languages allow you to eliminate repetition in many different ways. Java interfaces with default methods are very close to 'traits', Kotlin has the same features with real properties and convenient syntaxes. It also supports builder DSLs which would be ideal for this.
The main reason to use such languages is that you get full IDE features out of the box, for instance, "show me everything that uses this trait/interface/abstract base class" is one click away. Refactoring is easy.
But there are other reasons. You will often want to define some behavior that can be composed, but which leaves "slots" that the user has to fill out. Other times you need to say "something just like that, but adjusted a bit". OOP type systems are good at this sort of thing.
The DevOps world seems to continually go through cycles where someone says, full languages are too powerful, we need a declarative subset! And then it's too limited and leads to too much repetition, so you start getting stuff like if statements encoded into YAML and other nonsense. And then people get dissatisfied and try to invent another minimal declarative markup, and the cycle repeats.