5 ms·

Did that guy just suggest that to make infrastructure-as-code easier to understand we should make it more like CSS?

by twic 3y ago

twic 3y ago
What i think we really need: 1. A low-level, open-ended language for describing infrastructure; it should have absolutely no facilities for abstraction, should be human-legible and machine-readable (so based on JSON, probably), and should be applicable to everything from configuring physical hosts and switches up to containers. 2. For each kind of infrastructure, a tool which can apply that language to the infrastructure; one for AWS, one for physical hosts, one for Kubernetes i suppose, etc. 3. Tools and libraries for producing documents in that language from more expressive, concise sources; could be a YAML-to-language compiler, could be a classic Ruby DSL, could be a Python API, could be this guy's CSS idea, could be a GPT prompt, whatever. Mostly, i want options for the last part to include libraries in sensible programming languages. Then i can just write real code, with full abstractive power, and the possibility of unit tests etc, to define my infrastructure, run it, and feed the output to the applier tool. No more enterprise YAML engineering. No more trying to shoehorn abstraction into Jinja2 templates. Just normal code. Because the code produces the language, rather than operating on resource directly, writing a new library / DSL / whatever, based on a cool new model which will solve everyone's problems, becomes very easy. You don't have to build a whole IaC tool from scratch. It also means you have an obvious and simple checkpoint to apply diffing, linting, security checks, etc. Not on the input code, but on the resulting document. And it means you have one place you can always look to determine the ground truth of what is going on.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  You just described the role of Terraform. HCL is very JSON like and human readable
  - rirze 3y ago
    fwiw, you can write Terraform in JSON too. Not recommending it, but it's equivalent.
    - firesteelrain 3y ago
      Yea HashiCorp talks about it but also does not recommend it
  - twic 3y ago
    I've never used Terraform. So HCL is the low-level language i talk about; what does a human write to generate it?
    - firesteelrain 3y ago
      They write HCL/JSON. It’s not by definition low level anything per computer science standards. It’s very high level. It’s declarative.
      - twic 3y ago
        So not what i described at all then. The whole idea is to have a low-level language you can generate with high-level code written in a real programming language.
        firesteelrain 3y ago
        IaC isn’t programming. It is more like config files that have some scripting elements like for loops
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  > 1. A low-level, open-ended language for describing infrastructure; it should have absolutely no facilities for abstraction, should be human-legible and machine-readable (so based on JSON, probably), and should be applicable to everything from configuring physical hosts and switches up to containers. Sorry, but if it's doesn't have abstraction it's not readable. You get smothered in details. No forest, just trees. People will just create a framework that generates the file like Sass does with CSS.
  - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
    I think what is considered low level has to be qualified here. In my opinion I should be able to request virtual cores and memory the same way I do in an os. When in c I can malloc, calloc, or mmap or brk if I'm on a Linux system. If I'm doing concurrent thing in c I have to specifically request a thread then manage it. If I can do these, why can't I have a library where I can make those requests to my cloud provider from my code? To me, low level would be individually requesting resources as I need them with abstractions that let me ignore physical vs virtual distinctions. To me, this would be fairly readable. C like code requesting then allocating memory and threads just makes sense to me and I don't really care about if they're part of a larger machine. But I also think of low level from my code's perspective not from my infrastructure's perspective. I'm curious what you think would need to be targeted for something to be both cloud native and low level? I rarely hear people discuss this type of classification.
  - twic 3y ago
    > Sorry, but if it's doesn't have abstraction it's not readable. This is why i very carefully wrote "legible" instead of "readable". > You get smothered in details. No forest, just trees. People will just create a framework that generates the file like Sass does with CSS. That ... is exactly what i was suggesting?!
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  > so based on JSON, probably How about something better, like EDN? https://github.com/edn-format/edn https://github.com/edn-format/edn
cptskippy 3y ago
I think the part that upsets me is he specifically calls out the problem CSS was meant to fix, but then presents the current usage of CSS doesn't fix the problem but instead inverts it. Instead of having to scour code for instances of an attribute you wish to change, you're scouring output for potential negative consequences to a 1px margin shift you added to a style used everywhere. It seems like this will just amplify mistakes when a lowly dev tries to increase the available RAM of their resource and instead doubles the entire RAM allotment of a resource type for the entire enterprise.
- erikerikson 3y ago
  This objection reminds me of those to AOP. With great power comes great responsibility. The increased efficiency means you can make the greater investment when it's appropriate and avoid far greater expenditures. Also, tools like Eclipse's XRef view become required.
  - cptskippy 3y ago
    > With great power comes great responsibility. And in an environment where staff are a cost optimization and not everyone is a 10x coder or engineer, there will be individuals in power who are not as responsible as you would like. So it's better to have a system where you limit one individual's ability to cause harm rather than amplify it.
    - erikerikson 3y ago
      Automated validation has always seemed to catch that sort of risk just fine.
      - cptskippy 3y ago
        In an environment where staff are a cost optimization, tech debt and things like CI/CD are luxuries. Much of it will be half baked or poorly implemented. Automation of unit tests and validation are going to be afterthoughts at best.
naikrovek 3y ago
I think if you use CSS as a source of lessons learned after the mistakes were implemented and cemented, then yes. If you aim for where CSS was intended, and make decisions which do not compromise that direction, then it's fine goal. The layering of distinctly-defined concerns contained in separate files which collectively project a merged specification to an IaC tool is a good idea, I think.
NathanKP 3y ago
Don't get me wrong CSS isn't perfect, but it has done a really good job of scaling through difficult problems as HTML, and browsers, and user expectations have grown over the decades. The tooling and CSS frameworks have gotten really good. I think HTML + CSS is an example of a declarative system where you can start out not knowing very much about it, just drop in Bootstrap or Tailwind, and start getting great results by using prebuilt CSS classes from someone else. This is what is missing in most modern infrastructure as code. Sure you can start out with prebuilt IaC templates from someone else, but these templates are basically like getting handed a big chunk of HTML that has inline styles on it. It might render great in the browser and look great, but its hard to read, its hard to understand why it works, and you'll have trouble adding on your changes to it without breaking things. What I'd like to do is decouple the semantic aspects of infrastructure from the specific configuration aspect, similar to how HTML + CSS lets developers write their semantic markup with semantic CSS class names, and then have a CSS framework provide the exact styles that make it look pretty. Infrastructure as code needs a similar standard library of semantic configuration mix-ins that you can apply to your infrastructure as layered mutations to produce the final result. There are many tools out there approaching this challenge right now from different ways, and I think the future of infrastructure as code is going to look quite different from what most people are doing today, more like HTML + CSS, or imperative code, than flat YAML and static structures that must list out all their own properties.

Did that guy just suggest that to make infrastructure-as-code easier to understand we should make it more like CSS?

by twic 3y ago

Did that guy just suggest that to make infrastructure-as-code easier to understand we should make it more like CSS?

twic 3y ago

What i think we really need: 1. A low-level, open-ended language for describing infrastructure; it should have absolutely no facilities for abstraction, should be human-legible and machine-readable (so based on JSON, probably), and should be applicable to everything from configuring physical hosts and switches up to containers. 2. For each kind of infrastructure, a tool which can apply that language to the infrastructure; one for AWS, one for physical hosts, one for Kubernetes i suppose, etc. 3. Tools and libraries for producing documents in that language from more expressive, concise sources; could be a YAML-to-language compiler, could be a classic Ruby DSL, could be a Python API, could be this guy's CSS idea, could be a GPT prompt, whatever. Mostly, i want options for the last part to include libraries in sensible programming languages. Then i can just write real code, with full abstractive power, and the possibility of unit tests etc, to define my infrastructure, run it, and feed the output to the applier tool. No more enterprise YAML engineering. No more trying to shoehorn abstraction into Jinja2 templates. Just normal code. Because the code produces the language, rather than operating on resource directly, writing a new library / DSL / whatever, based on a cool new model which will solve everyone's problems, becomes very easy. You don't have to build a whole IaC tool from scratch. It also means you have an obvious and simple checkpoint to apply diffing, linting, security checks, etc. Not on the input code, but on the resulting document. And it means you have one place you can always look to determine the ground truth of what is going on.

firesteelrain 3y ago
You just described the role of Terraform. HCL is very JSON like and human readable
- rirze 3y ago
  fwiw, you can write Terraform in JSON too. Not recommending it, but it's equivalent.
  - firesteelrain 3y ago
    Yea HashiCorp talks about it but also does not recommend it
- twic 3y ago
  I've never used Terraform. So HCL is the low-level language i talk about; what does a human write to generate it?
  - firesteelrain 3y ago
    They write HCL/JSON. It’s not by definition low level anything per computer science standards. It’s very high level. It’s declarative.
    - twic 3y ago
      So not what i described at all then. The whole idea is to have a low-level language you can generate with high-level code written in a real programming language.
      - firesteelrain 3y ago
        IaC isn’t programming. It is more like config files that have some scripting elements like for loops
Pet_Ant 3y ago
> 1. A low-level, open-ended language for describing infrastructure; it should have absolutely no facilities for abstraction, should be human-legible and machine-readable (so based on JSON, probably), and should be applicable to everything from configuring physical hosts and switches up to containers. Sorry, but if it's doesn't have abstraction it's not readable. You get smothered in details. No forest, just trees. People will just create a framework that generates the file like Sass does with CSS.
- 6D794163636F756 3y ago
  I think what is considered low level has to be qualified here. In my opinion I should be able to request virtual cores and memory the same way I do in an os. When in c I can malloc, calloc, or mmap or brk if I'm on a Linux system. If I'm doing concurrent thing in c I have to specifically request a thread then manage it. If I can do these, why can't I have a library where I can make those requests to my cloud provider from my code? To me, low level would be individually requesting resources as I need them with abstractions that let me ignore physical vs virtual distinctions. To me, this would be fairly readable. C like code requesting then allocating memory and threads just makes sense to me and I don't really care about if they're part of a larger machine. But I also think of low level from my code's perspective not from my infrastructure's perspective. I'm curious what you think would need to be targeted for something to be both cloud native and low level? I rarely hear people discuss this type of classification.
- twic 3y ago
  > Sorry, but if it's doesn't have abstraction it's not readable. This is why i very carefully wrote "legible" instead of "readable". > You get smothered in details. No forest, just trees. People will just create a framework that generates the file like Sass does with CSS. That ... is exactly what i was suggesting?!
slowmovintarget 3y ago
> so based on JSON, probably How about something better, like EDN? https://github.com/edn-format/edn https://github.com/edn-format/edn

cptskippy 3y ago

I think the part that upsets me is he specifically calls out the problem CSS was meant to fix, but then presents the current usage of CSS doesn't fix the problem but instead inverts it. Instead of having to scour code for instances of an attribute you wish to change, you're scouring output for potential negative consequences to a 1px margin shift you added to a style used everywhere. It seems like this will just amplify mistakes when a lowly dev tries to increase the available RAM of their resource and instead doubles the entire RAM allotment of a resource type for the entire enterprise.

erikerikson 3y ago
This objection reminds me of those to AOP. With great power comes great responsibility. The increased efficiency means you can make the greater investment when it's appropriate and avoid far greater expenditures. Also, tools like Eclipse's XRef view become required.
- cptskippy 3y ago
  > With great power comes great responsibility. And in an environment where staff are a cost optimization and not everyone is a 10x coder or engineer, there will be individuals in power who are not as responsible as you would like. So it's better to have a system where you limit one individual's ability to cause harm rather than amplify it.
  - erikerikson 3y ago
    Automated validation has always seemed to catch that sort of risk just fine.
    - cptskippy 3y ago
      In an environment where staff are a cost optimization, tech debt and things like CI/CD are luxuries. Much of it will be half baked or poorly implemented. Automation of unit tests and validation are going to be afterthoughts at best.

naikrovek 3y ago

I think if you use CSS as a source of lessons learned after the mistakes were implemented and cemented, then yes. If you aim for where CSS was intended, and make decisions which do not compromise that direction, then it's fine goal. The layering of distinctly-defined concerns contained in separate files which collectively project a merged specification to an IaC tool is a good idea, I think.

NathanKP 3y ago

Don't get me wrong CSS isn't perfect, but it has done a really good job of scaling through difficult problems as HTML, and browsers, and user expectations have grown over the decades. The tooling and CSS frameworks have gotten really good. I think HTML + CSS is an example of a declarative system where you can start out not knowing very much about it, just drop in Bootstrap or Tailwind, and start getting great results by using prebuilt CSS classes from someone else. This is what is missing in most modern infrastructure as code. Sure you can start out with prebuilt IaC templates from someone else, but these templates are basically like getting handed a big chunk of HTML that has inline styles on it. It might render great in the browser and look great, but its hard to read, its hard to understand why it works, and you'll have trouble adding on your changes to it without breaking things. What I'd like to do is decouple the semantic aspects of infrastructure from the specific configuration aspect, similar to how HTML + CSS lets developers write their semantic markup with semantic CSS class names, and then have a CSS framework provide the exact styles that make it look pretty. Infrastructure as code needs a similar standard library of semantic configuration mix-ins that you can apply to your infrastructure as layered mutations to produce the final result. There are many tools out there approaching this challenge right now from different ways, and I think the future of infrastructure as code is going to look quite different from what most people are doing today, more like HTML + CSS, or imperative code, than flat YAML and static structures that must list out all their own properties.