Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

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So, so many questions.

Let me preface this by saying - if this works well enough to give devs confidence in the tool, this could be revolutionary. It would combine implementation, documentation, visuals and deployment into a single view simple enough for everyday devs to grok.

I couldn't find any documentation - if there is, that answers these questions, please link me to them.

1. How does authentication work? Is it handled by the tool?

2. Can it support non-AWS resources, such as Grafana?

3. How does version control work? Can you review changes, roll back, etc?

4. In the demo on the main site, the security group was not attached to any VPC, what's going on there?

5. Does this remain maintainable when dealing with very large configurations, for example, a multi-account AWS setup with tens of thousands of resources. If so, what mechanisms are available in this tool to facilitate this maintainability?

Thank you

It's very early - it doesn't do much yet (but what it does do is compelling!). There isn't a ton of documentation, but we have put a lot of real user research into things.

1. Authentication works through Auth0. We're building towards multiple deployment models, where your account works across all of them. That said, it's all open source, so if Auth0 doesn't work for someone, we're happy to make it pluggable.

2. You can model anything you like. Under the hood it's a hypergraph of Typescript functions - so you would model Grafana, and then make calls to its API when actions are needed.

3. It's built in to the model via change-sets. As you do change the model, we show you whats changed, and what actions we would take. The design is heading toward letting you have comprehensive reviews based on which portions of the entire model are impacted. Roll-backs aren't really a thing in infrastructure land, but you can see old versions of the model and decide you want that to be the current one.

4. We model the upstream 1:1 - so that configuration uses the default VPC in the AWS account (which has likely been deleted if you use Terraform, for example.)

5. It's too early to have very large configurations yet. But there are techniques we can borrow from other domains - nesting, for example, or layers. We're working on the fundamentals first, and then we will deal with scale.

Great questions!

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