Show HN: Deploy to K8s without YAML using ShuttleOps

I think Dhall is in the right category of solutions for this problem. YAML needs to be reusable and text templates a la Helm are an amusingly bad solution. Moreover, I think static typing is a very nice feature for things that generate YAML since it’s so easy to make mistakes with these kinds of tools. I’ve used Starlark for these kinds of tasks in the past and the lack of static typing has been a sore point.

I feel like projects like helm are in the templating html with php days. But instead of html+php you get yaml+go. Something better must be right around the corner because people have been solving similar problems for years.

A company called QualiSystems made some software called CloudShell that was basically a web UI to creating architectural diagrams and hooking each component up to code. There's drivers pre-made for each piece. You connect the pieces, click "Deploy app", and it builds everything you need, deploys your app, runs tests, tears it all down after, etc. The devs literally assemble the whole system in a UI and then just "run" the whole thing. Ops is essentially no longer needed except to write drivers and define policy/governance. This is what we need more of.

Instead, we have Ops teams who are in charge of infrastructure, and spend weeks writing custom Terraform modules and CI/CD solutions just to get some basic infrastructure up. Oh, you need a change? Sure, it'll just be another day full of writing and testing code for me to make that one tiny change in infra. It's ridiculous. Devs should be able to do this work themselves as needed, without waiting for someone else to do it for them. The same idea applies to K8s.

Personally I think "deploying to K8s without YAML" is not a challenging problem for most teams as there are lots of different solutions to that. Where they actually need help is in gaining agency and independence, and to do that we need friendly user interfaces to automated guide-rails, so if the dev wants to deploy a new stack, nothing is getting in their way, but the end result is according to a corporate standard.

I'm using Cuelang these days, Dhall is another option

They are both crappy tools for humans to write anything in and are better as a tools for machines to exchange data, which is accidentally human-readable in case debugging is neccessary.

  foo: |
    bar
    baz

It's not massively useful for k8s outside of config maps, but for other uses of YAML, it's great for embedding snippets of other languages that would otherwise need quoting.