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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Hi Mitchell!

A problem I had with Gitlab Auto CI/CD was that even though it fully abstracted away Kubernetes and Helm, when something went wrong I was suddenly confronted with having to learn and understand all of it.

Then when I fully understood it, writing my own simple .gitlab-ci.yml was orders of magnitude easier and simpler than using the big abstracted auto ci/cd system.

Waypoint seems to be similarly abstracting away a lot of complicated details. Is there a philosophy about what waypoint expects of its users, especially when deployments break out of the cookie cutter standard situations?

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The level of Waypoint abstraction is the same as Terraform. You are not expected to use Waypoint and not understand the underlying platform. This is similar to Terraform: you still have to know something like AWS well to use Terraform.

With Waypoint, we aren't doing any magic, you specifically opt into a Kubernetes plugin for example. If something goes wrong, you'll have to understand Kubernetes. Waypoint isn't trying to replace that, we're just trying to provide a common workflow on top of these platforms (same as Terraform with infra).

Product Leader from GitLab here - In support of what Mitchell said. One lesson we learned from Auto DevOps is that composability and transparency were key. Just like you mentioned tinco - users struggled when things eventually broke - or they wanted to customize beyond the out of the box customizations that were available. That's why we evolved to have composable Auto DevOps[1] and Helm installs via CI/CD pipelines.[2]

[1]https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/customize.html#... [2]https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/applications.html#i...

Hey, yeah sorry I didn't mention that. We were a pretty early adopter I guess, we've been on it for well over a year now and it's evolved a lot since then. That it's now split up in separate modules makes it much easier to work with. Something that I couldn't find back then was tutorials or blog posts on how to really work with it, not just deploy happy case apps. The product wasn't very popular yet so there was really no community producing that kind of blog post.

Also that the Gitlab issues have now merged into one repository has made reporting an issue so much clearer. You guys are constantly improving at such a rapid pace, definitely kudos for that.

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