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Comment by shahadarsh | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN, This is Adarsh, Founder of CloudKnit (https://github.com/cloudknit-io/cloudknit). CloudKnit is an open-source solution for managing cloud environments in a declarative way instead of using imperative pipelines. It also comes with dashboards to help visualize environments and observe them.

CloudKnit is based on a concept called Environment as Code (https://www.cloudknit.io/blog/from-infrastructure-as-code-to...). Environment as Code is an abstraction over cloud-native tools that provides a declarative way of defining an entire environment. It has a Control Plane that manages the state of the environment, including resource dependencies, and drift detection and reconciliation.

Please let us know your comments/feedback. Thanks.

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This is interesting, but how does it compare to Pulumi and Terraform? Is Cloudknit intending to compete with these?

Thanks for the question. I'm assuming you are talking about the open source Pulumi and Terraform CLI. We don't compete with them but rather integrate with them. These IaC tools and even other cloud native tools like Helm/Kustomize work well to manage individual components of your "Environment" but folks still need to write pipeline code on top of these tools to get an Environment thats useful. The pipeline code is imperative and becomes very difficult to manage as you scale. Environment as Code is a declarative way (with state management) to provision entire environment.

If you think about this using a Lego analogy, CloudKnit connects various lego pieces (components within your environment like networking, eks, db, web apps, backend apps) and builds a lego toy (entire environment). Those various components will still be provisioned using Pulumi, TF, Helm Kustomize etc.

We also provide workflow, visibility for the environments.

We have a diagram in our README (https://github.com/cloudknit-io/cloudknit#readme) that explains how CloudKnit fits in with existing tools. Please check "Diagram 1: Where does CloudKnit fit in with existing tools".

Also, here is a talk I gave about Environment as Code that might help understand the concept behind CloudKnit better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INCUMYl2B-0&t=9s

Hope this helps.

Thank, Adarsh

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