7 ms·

`helm` is an absolute garbage. I'll reserve judgment about `kustomize` until I have more practical experience, but so far it looks to me that it's going to be a

by dpc_pw 6y ago

`helm` is an absolute garbage. I'll reserve judgment about `kustomize` until I have more practical experience, but so far it looks to me that it's going to be another YAML disaster. The problem with k8s ecosystem is that developers conflated k8s using yaml for a semi-human-readable serialization of k8s resources, as reason to employ YAML to absolutely everything. What I'd like is to generate serialized yaml files ... you know ... with code. Using some typed programming language, to be able to build any abstractions required for the job, and get some checks, compiler errors, and even ability to have asserts, unit-tests and so on. Instead, I have to dig YAML with a pickaxe in the YAML-mine without any technology to assist me.

justicezyx 6y ago
Insider joke: K8s was born to solve the same problem Borg solved or simply design in such a way to not have that problem. One of them is the config files hell. Borgcfg files ranks #3 in terms of line count across all of Google. (Borgcfg language is similar to Jsonnet, helm) In terms of the amount of power wielded buy a single CLI, `borgcfg`, this little program that has less than 50k lines of nontesting code, stands at a peak dwarfs almost anything else inside Google. I declared in 2015 that k8s will eventually enjoy the same borgcfg problem. And I was advocating code driving application management approach as you suggested, not the configuration as code (behind the infrastructure as code facade). Well, it seems I am still on the track to be on the correct camp...
- esprehn 6y ago
  Relevant thread (with you) from the nearby past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20849454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20849454 The yaml monster in k8s is quite unpleasant. It's always been surprising to me how we somehow ended up with executable BUILD files but totally static deploy files.
- sandGorgon 6y ago
  What do you think about Cue ? There's a very interesting issue about why Cue improves upon Borg. https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33#issuecomment-483615374 https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33#issuecomment-483615...
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    Sorry, I have little knowledge on Cuelang. @mpvl is one of my most admired Googler. I promised to contribute to the Cue project, but haven't found time (typical startup employee situation, but it seems there is no trouble to find time surfing hacker news...).
AaronFriel 6y ago
Are you familiar with Pulumi? It does away with the notion that you need serialized yaml files, although in its current incarnation it can produce them, and instead runs programs which generates collections of named (and hierarchically defined) resources which can then be "applied" as a batch. It uses lazy values to generate a directed graph to determine the order for creating and tearing down resources as well as safely propagate configuration outputs and secrets.
- gscho 6y ago
  ...and you need to use their SaaS to make it work, no?
  - cottonseed 6y ago
    I don't think so, but you need to manage/sync the infrastructure state yourself.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Nope, you can sync state using just an S3 bucket (or local filesystem). It’s a bit hidden in their docs though.
  - AaronFriel 6y ago
    No, just like Terraform works with different storage backends, theirs does too.
richm31415 6y ago
Or eschew config files altogether and write operators in golang . . . https://sdk.operatorframework.io/ https://sdk.operatorframework.io/
- SomaticPirate 6y ago
  Still have to write a CRD if you want to do anything useful (arguably still requires a config).
tootie 6y ago
If you're doing more than storing config values in YAML, you're playing with fire. I've really grown to dislike the trend in "developing by descriptor". It's great when it works and impossible to debug when anything goes wrong. And also, not easily testable.
creztoe 6y ago
Could you explain why helm is garbage? I think it suits its purpose rather well without being too complex. You can essentially "plug-in" different types of resources rather easily. Especially in v3 now that you don't need to install Tiller and can avoid setting those cluster permission requirements. Have you tried some Kubernetes api libraries? You can generate and configure resources with [python kubernetes-client](https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python) without much trouble. Personally I prefer editing them as JSON instead of python objects, but it isn't too bad.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  > Could you explain why helm is garbage? Not the OP, but.. 1. YAML string templating makes it very easy to get indentation and/or quotation wrong, and the error messages can easily end up pretty far from the actual errors. Structured data should be generated with structured templating. 2. "Values" aren't typechecked or cleaned. 3. Easy to end up in a state where a failed deploy leaves you with a mess to clean up by hand. 4. No good way to preview what a deploy will change. 5. Weird interactions when resources are edited manually (especially back in Helm 2, but still a thing). 6. No good way to migrate objects into a Helm chart without deleting and recreating them. 7. Tons of repetitive boilerplate in each chart to customize basic settings (like replica counts). It's a typical Go solution, in all the wrong ways.
  - alephu5 6y ago
    It's not going to solve all your problems but dhall can fix your first few gripes. I've been using it for several months and it's an excellent way to write configuration imo.
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      Yeah, I have used Nix to generate them in the past, which worked pretty great too. But Helm does, admittedly, solve a real problem: garbage collecting old resources when they're deleted from the repo. I just wish we could have something much simpler that only did that...
dilyevsky 6y ago
Sounds like you may enjoy https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod (some assembly may be required)
gscho 6y ago
You can't just say helm is garbage without saying why.
bfrydl 6y ago
I don't know if I think Helm is garbage but I feel like it's almost always more trouble than its worth. Most charts can be boiled down to just a couple resources and instead of sifting through its weirdo templates you might as well just look at the actual resource configs. It's almost always just a single Deployment or similar + RBAC. I've actually been using Terraform to manage Kubernetes resources at my latest job, along with literally everything else. I don't even use alb-ingress-controller or external-dns or any of that. I just have Terraform make target groups from the service resources. It breaks a lot less.
- OJFord 6y ago
  But Helm barely adds any boilerplate over that 'single deployment or similar + RBAC'? Just a Chart.yaml (minimal of which is very small) and adding the option to parameterise or templatise the resources. I don't know why you wouldn't, we don't say 'I don't know if .deb/.rpm/PKGINFO/etc. is worth it, most packages are just a binary'. For Helm to add LoC you'd have to all but not use it, and even then it'd be about 3LoC. Setup is no harder, with N kubectl applies becoming 1 helm install. I also started using terraform (directly instead of just triggering helm) - are you using kubernetes tf resources directly though, or the helm provider?
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Most helm charts I have seen and used have a deployment yaml or statefulset or daemonset plus a service yaml, optional ingress yaml, sidecar containers for metrics, and several others I'm forgetting at the moment. And I would say most as in 90% of the charts on helm hub.
x87678r 6y ago
> Instead, I have to dig YAML with a pickaxe in the YAML-mine without any technology to assist me. Someone here talked about the joys of using the API with protobufs. Something I want to try out because it sounds clean.
aeontech 6y ago
Have you looked at Dhall or Tanka? They are both designed to solve exactly this problem (and I couldn’t agree with you more)
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  Honestly, I am not a fan of "configuration languages". Why do we need another bunch of languages. Were the existing languages not good enough? There's already shitload of them. The only place where I find it useful is when the config is provider by an untrusted party. But even then scheme, lua would probably fit the bill. Not strong feelings about it though, maybe I'm wrong. All I want is a library for my favorite language, where I can easily output bunch of `yaml` files to feed to k8s. I guess pulumi is kind of like that, but I never had a chance to try it.
  - kqr 6y ago
    I don't know about the others, but at least Dhall provides features that are literally impossible to get from a general purpose programming language, like semantic hashing, totality, and such.
  - kdkeyser 6y ago
    My experience with using general purpose languages for things like configuration or build systems has not been great. You always seem to end up with building a bunch of abstractions on top of that language, which culminates in another in-house configuration/build DSL, for which no public info is available. It is also very hard to prevent people from using the escape hatch of the general purpose language to "fix a problem quickly", while introducing unpredictable side effects. Scons (using Python) and Gradle (using Groovy / Kotlin) are 2 cases where I have seen this go very wrong, very quickly. I now strongly prefer Maven, even with its warts and XML verbosity. On the other hand, configuration languages also often suck, the abomination that is HCL (e.g used in Terraform) comes to mind (especially in its early days). Turns out it is really hard to make a good language, and a bad configuration language is even worse than using a general purpose language. I do like Dhall though: sufficiently powerful so you never have to repeat yourself, while also preventing you from doing fancy stuff you will later regret, all with a very readable syntax, and the type system helps to catch typos / mistakes early. I now use it to generate all config files for tools that consume json/yaml, and often for other text based config files as well (where you can use it as a powerful type-safe template engine)
knocte 6y ago
> .. with code Use Pulumi, it does exactly this.
ecnahc515 6y ago
I generally agree. I'm using kustomize right now, but I'm also using helm charts via a kustomize plugin called chartInflator. It allows us to re-use existing upstream boilerplate while still using kustomize. Though I've not been entirely happy with kustomize either, and I'm thinking I might begin to investigate jsonnet for some things.
AlphaSite 6y ago
Carvel/k14s has been very nice for the usecase I had. Use ytt to generate the yams, using a yaml aware variant of skylark and kapp to manage the actual atomic deployment, delete, etc. It’s very simple and worked quite well for me. Disclaimer: work at VMware but on a different team (it’s an OS tool built by some of our engineers, which we use internally)
kkapelon 6y ago
> What I'd like is to generate serialized yaml files ... you know ... with code Check out Pulumi (I am not affiliated with them in any way)
cbushko 6y ago
This is why I use Terraform for my kubernetes objects. Yes, it is a DSL and not perfect but it has many advantages over helm such as: - State. I cannot express how useful having the desired and actual state of a system is. It makes it so much easier to determined what has changed in between terraform applies which in turn makes tracking down problems easier. - Providers. Being able to chain resources together from other systems is very powerful. As an example, I can: 1) create a database with a random name 2) create a user/password for that database 3) save the data above as a kubernetes secret 4) pass that secret into my kubernetes container for the service to use. And you can easily change database to be anything such as a storage bucket, dns entry, twilio account, stripe account, etc. Now try and do the exact same thing with helm! - Providers Part 2: You can write your own providers to talk to your OWN services. I have done this and written up some go code to talk to our internal APIs when setting up new customers. It is very easy to create your own terraform resources to do this. There are more reasons but I have work to do :)

by dpc_pw 6y ago

justicezyx 6y ago

Insider joke: K8s was born to solve the same problem Borg solved or simply design in such a way to not have that problem. One of them is the config files hell. Borgcfg files ranks #3 in terms of line count across all of Google. (Borgcfg language is similar to Jsonnet, helm) In terms of the amount of power wielded buy a single CLI, `borgcfg`, this little program that has less than 50k lines of nontesting code, stands at a peak dwarfs almost anything else inside Google. I declared in 2015 that k8s will eventually enjoy the same borgcfg problem. And I was advocating code driving application management approach as you suggested, not the configuration as code (behind the infrastructure as code facade). Well, it seems I am still on the track to be on the correct camp...

esprehn 6y ago
Relevant thread (with you) from the nearby past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20849454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20849454 The yaml monster in k8s is quite unpleasant. It's always been surprising to me how we somehow ended up with executable BUILD files but totally static deploy files.
sandGorgon 6y ago
What do you think about Cue ? There's a very interesting issue about why Cue improves upon Borg. https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33#issuecomment-483615374 https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33#issuecomment-483615...
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Sorry, I have little knowledge on Cuelang. @mpvl is one of my most admired Googler. I promised to contribute to the Cue project, but haven't found time (typical startup employee situation, but it seems there is no trouble to find time surfing hacker news...).

AaronFriel 6y ago

Are you familiar with Pulumi? It does away with the notion that you need serialized yaml files, although in its current incarnation it can produce them, and instead runs programs which generates collections of named (and hierarchically defined) resources which can then be "applied" as a batch. It uses lazy values to generate a directed graph to determine the order for creating and tearing down resources as well as safely propagate configuration outputs and secrets.

gscho 6y ago
...and you need to use their SaaS to make it work, no?
- cottonseed 6y ago
  I don't think so, but you need to manage/sync the infrastructure state yourself.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Nope, you can sync state using just an S3 bucket (or local filesystem). It’s a bit hidden in their docs though.
- AaronFriel 6y ago
  No, just like Terraform works with different storage backends, theirs does too.

richm31415 6y ago

Or eschew config files altogether and write operators in golang . . . https://sdk.operatorframework.io/ https://sdk.operatorframework.io/

SomaticPirate 6y ago
Still have to write a CRD if you want to do anything useful (arguably still requires a config).

tootie 6y ago

If you're doing more than storing config values in YAML, you're playing with fire. I've really grown to dislike the trend in "developing by descriptor". It's great when it works and impossible to debug when anything goes wrong. And also, not easily testable.

creztoe 6y ago

Could you explain why helm is garbage? I think it suits its purpose rather well without being too complex. You can essentially "plug-in" different types of resources rather easily. Especially in v3 now that you don't need to install Tiller and can avoid setting those cluster permission requirements. Have you tried some Kubernetes api libraries? You can generate and configure resources with [python kubernetes-client](https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python) without much trouble. Personally I prefer editing them as JSON instead of python objects, but it isn't too bad.

Nullabillity 6y ago
> Could you explain why helm is garbage? Not the OP, but.. 1. YAML string templating makes it very easy to get indentation and/or quotation wrong, and the error messages can easily end up pretty far from the actual errors. Structured data should be generated with structured templating. 2. "Values" aren't typechecked or cleaned. 3. Easy to end up in a state where a failed deploy leaves you with a mess to clean up by hand. 4. No good way to preview what a deploy will change. 5. Weird interactions when resources are edited manually (especially back in Helm 2, but still a thing). 6. No good way to migrate objects into a Helm chart without deleting and recreating them. 7. Tons of repetitive boilerplate in each chart to customize basic settings (like replica counts). It's a typical Go solution, in all the wrong ways.
- alephu5 6y ago
  It's not going to solve all your problems but dhall can fix your first few gripes. I've been using it for several months and it's an excellent way to write configuration imo.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Yeah, I have used Nix to generate them in the past, which worked pretty great too. But Helm does, admittedly, solve a real problem: garbage collecting old resources when they're deleted from the repo. I just wish we could have something much simpler that only did that...

dilyevsky 6y ago

Sounds like you may enjoy https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod https://github.com/cruise-automation/isopod (some assembly may be required)

gscho 6y ago

You can't just say helm is garbage without saying why.

bfrydl 6y ago

I don't know if I think Helm is garbage but I feel like it's almost always more trouble than its worth. Most charts can be boiled down to just a couple resources and instead of sifting through its weirdo templates you might as well just look at the actual resource configs. It's almost always just a single Deployment or similar + RBAC. I've actually been using Terraform to manage Kubernetes resources at my latest job, along with literally everything else. I don't even use alb-ingress-controller or external-dns or any of that. I just have Terraform make target groups from the service resources. It breaks a lot less.

OJFord 6y ago
But Helm barely adds any boilerplate over that 'single deployment or similar + RBAC'? Just a Chart.yaml (minimal of which is very small) and adding the option to parameterise or templatise the resources. I don't know why you wouldn't, we don't say 'I don't know if .deb/.rpm/PKGINFO/etc. is worth it, most packages are just a binary'. For Helm to add LoC you'd have to all but not use it, and even then it'd be about 3LoC. Setup is no harder, with N kubectl applies becoming 1 helm install. I also started using terraform (directly instead of just triggering helm) - are you using kubernetes tf resources directly though, or the helm provider?
jjeaff 6y ago
Most helm charts I have seen and used have a deployment yaml or statefulset or daemonset plus a service yaml, optional ingress yaml, sidecar containers for metrics, and several others I'm forgetting at the moment. And I would say most as in 90% of the charts on helm hub.

x87678r 6y ago

> Instead, I have to dig YAML with a pickaxe in the YAML-mine without any technology to assist me. Someone here talked about the joys of using the API with protobufs. Something I want to try out because it sounds clean.

aeontech 6y ago

Have you looked at Dhall or Tanka? They are both designed to solve exactly this problem (and I couldn’t agree with you more)

dpc_pw 6y ago
Honestly, I am not a fan of "configuration languages". Why do we need another bunch of languages. Were the existing languages not good enough? There's already shitload of them. The only place where I find it useful is when the config is provider by an untrusted party. But even then scheme, lua would probably fit the bill. Not strong feelings about it though, maybe I'm wrong. All I want is a library for my favorite language, where I can easily output bunch of `yaml` files to feed to k8s. I guess pulumi is kind of like that, but I never had a chance to try it.
- kqr 6y ago
  I don't know about the others, but at least Dhall provides features that are literally impossible to get from a general purpose programming language, like semantic hashing, totality, and such.
- kdkeyser 6y ago
  My experience with using general purpose languages for things like configuration or build systems has not been great. You always seem to end up with building a bunch of abstractions on top of that language, which culminates in another in-house configuration/build DSL, for which no public info is available. It is also very hard to prevent people from using the escape hatch of the general purpose language to "fix a problem quickly", while introducing unpredictable side effects. Scons (using Python) and Gradle (using Groovy / Kotlin) are 2 cases where I have seen this go very wrong, very quickly. I now strongly prefer Maven, even with its warts and XML verbosity. On the other hand, configuration languages also often suck, the abomination that is HCL (e.g used in Terraform) comes to mind (especially in its early days). Turns out it is really hard to make a good language, and a bad configuration language is even worse than using a general purpose language. I do like Dhall though: sufficiently powerful so you never have to repeat yourself, while also preventing you from doing fancy stuff you will later regret, all with a very readable syntax, and the type system helps to catch typos / mistakes early. I now use it to generate all config files for tools that consume json/yaml, and often for other text based config files as well (where you can use it as a powerful type-safe template engine)

knocte 6y ago

> .. with code Use Pulumi, it does exactly this.

ecnahc515 6y ago

I generally agree. I'm using kustomize right now, but I'm also using helm charts via a kustomize plugin called chartInflator. It allows us to re-use existing upstream boilerplate while still using kustomize. Though I've not been entirely happy with kustomize either, and I'm thinking I might begin to investigate jsonnet for some things.

AlphaSite 6y ago

Carvel/k14s has been very nice for the usecase I had. Use ytt to generate the yams, using a yaml aware variant of skylark and kapp to manage the actual atomic deployment, delete, etc. It’s very simple and worked quite well for me. Disclaimer: work at VMware but on a different team (it’s an OS tool built by some of our engineers, which we use internally)

kkapelon 6y ago

> What I'd like is to generate serialized yaml files ... you know ... with code Check out Pulumi (I am not affiliated with them in any way)

cbushko 6y ago

This is why I use Terraform for my kubernetes objects. Yes, it is a DSL and not perfect but it has many advantages over helm such as: - State. I cannot express how useful having the desired and actual state of a system is. It makes it so much easier to determined what has changed in between terraform applies which in turn makes tracking down problems easier. - Providers. Being able to chain resources together from other systems is very powerful. As an example, I can: 1) create a database with a random name 2) create a user/password for that database 3) save the data above as a kubernetes secret 4) pass that secret into my kubernetes container for the service to use. And you can easily change database to be anything such as a storage bucket, dns entry, twilio account, stripe account, etc. Now try and do the exact same thing with helm! - Providers Part 2: You can write your own providers to talk to your OWN services. I have done this and written up some go code to talk to our internal APIs when setting up new customers. It is very easy to create your own terraform resources to do this. There are more reasons but I have work to do :)