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Recently I've been moving both my personal stuff and work stuff to Nomad and HCL is just SO much nicer than the convoluted YAML files that Kubernetes needs. I

Recently I've been moving both my personal stuff and work stuff to Nomad and HCL is just SO much nicer than the convoluted YAML files that Kubernetes needs. I know HCL gets a lot of hate around here but I find just dandy and I'd rather write HCL over YAML any day of the week. Also to just put another thumbs up for Nomad because it's been absolutely fantastic for us and has been so much easier to manage and deploy. We've begun testing edge deployments with it as well and so far looks very promising. Consul and Vault are also two Hasicorp products I can't live without at this point either. Vault is probably one of the first things I deploy now. Anyway rambling, I think a lot of people just immediately jump to Kubernetes without really ever giving Nomad a look first.

KronisLV 5y ago
Hmm, what are your thoughts on the Compose format (that's used in Docker Compose and Docker Swarm)? I agree that the format Kubernetes uses is probably a bit overcomplicated, which is why I've also sometimes used the aforementioned Compose format with tools like Kompose to save some of my time. In that regard, it's perhaps not the fault of YAML itself (even though the format has its own complexity problems), but rather of the tool using it. What personally keeps me away from HCL for the most part is the fact that a lot of the time you can find Compose files for various pieces of software online and only have to change some parameters for the most part to get stuff running vs having to rewrite all of it in a different format. Are there any Compose to HCL tools out there yet?
- proxysna 5y ago
  Yeah, you are right. It is not exactly YAML's fault but how it is used. I am ok with using it with ansible/salt/compose. But k8s is stretching it to it's limits and makes it cumbersome to use. And yeah, there is not much examples of HCL files for different software, but most of the time there is not much to adapt. Usually when i need to run something, i just take some random HCL file i have and substitute the docker image, edit the amount of resources and add storage and config via templates. And done. It might be confusing/intimidating at first, but like with anything after some time you should be ok.

KronisLV 5y ago

Hmm, what are your thoughts on the Compose format (that's used in Docker Compose and Docker Swarm)? I agree that the format Kubernetes uses is probably a bit overcomplicated, which is why I've also sometimes used the aforementioned Compose format with tools like Kompose to save some of my time. In that regard, it's perhaps not the fault of YAML itself (even though the format has its own complexity problems), but rather of the tool using it. What personally keeps me away from HCL for the most part is the fact that a lot of the time you can find Compose files for various pieces of software online and only have to change some parameters for the most part to get stuff running vs having to rewrite all of it in a different format. Are there any Compose to HCL tools out there yet?

proxysna 5y ago
Yeah, you are right. It is not exactly YAML's fault but how it is used. I am ok with using it with ansible/salt/compose. But k8s is stretching it to it's limits and makes it cumbersome to use. And yeah, there is not much examples of HCL files for different software, but most of the time there is not much to adapt. Usually when i need to run something, i just take some random HCL file i have and substitute the docker image, edit the amount of resources and add storage and config via templates. And done. It might be confusing/intimidating at first, but like with anything after some time you should be ok.