Cuelm

Experiments with CUE for Helm, Terraform, and more in the quest to reimagine devops ops. This repository has a collection of scripts and files to:

• generating CUE schemas for|from tools & apis
• enrichments and transformations, everything is a snowflake
• automation for creating e2e artifacts the CUE community can use

Currently

you can...

kubernetes:

• schemas and enrichments (schema/k8s)
• validate yaml resources
• generate yaml from CUE

terraform:

• generate TF provider schemas as JSON (reshaping & cuetifying is WIP) (schema/tf)

You'll need cue, dagger, and/or hof depending on which parts you use. We use these tools to automate CUE schema generation for all the things.

Goals

The inspirational idea is to build a CUE based experience as we develop code and ship it from developer to user. We want to leverage the various tools we already use, but also explore where a CUE first approach might yield something better.

• single config language spanning from commit to desired state
• Real packages, imports, references, language constructs
• Native schemas, defaults, templates, and transformations via Cue
• consistent, singular source-of-truth (as much as possible anyway)
• start as glue, replace when appropriate

I want to say

• deploy this app for me...

  • it needs a database table in my namespace, I may or may not have one running (dev/test/ci vs prod)
  • spin up required infra, but be lazy like dagger

• want a drop in upgrade for the vanilla cue import of k8s

  • publish a module, use as a dep eventually, import path domain, maybe need something else?
  • wrap vendor/k8s/... with schema/k8s/... rather than adding files into the generated content?
    • apiVersion & kind & other consts, port and other _ fields, perhaps we treat these differently?
  • hof create to add to current projects for now

Pains

DevOps' Inferno - The Circles of YamHell

• Helm: Yaml files with text/template, ... more ... talked about elsewhere
• HCL: Terraform, bad language constructs, leaky abstractions (most have this leak)
• Pulumi: Language SDK or "yaml" (extended and !!"interact with outside world")
• Crossplain: how does this fit in? Has some improvements, but need k8s just to do tf?!

Generally,

• multiple, tool specific, languages or "enhancements"
• competing workflows, or tools viaing to be the most important

Current work

• Dagger to do cue import k8s

• fill in the gaps

  • add schema to ports (was _)
  • add apiVersion & kind to all k8s objects
  • various fields are underspecified, (like ip / cidr)

• defaults (show different scales of providing them, schema separate from defaults)

• Hof creator to setup using this project

• publish OCI modules to github for enriched k8s

  • (make these github.com/hofstadter-io/k8s.io/... explain the hof prefix will go away)
  • Dagger to publish

• example of a widely used chart side-by-side with the CUE version (especially show the templates) (also cloc)

• Hof flow to run gen / stacks / charts / helm

Usage

• Setup your project as a Cue module (hof mod init cue <module name>)
• Add this repo to your cue.mods file and hof mod vendor cue
• Create Cue files using this (external example)
• cue export -e Install | kubectl apply -f -