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Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

iasql.com

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21–30 of 113 posts

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#21

Post by bink »

yevpats wrote: post #18

Interesting how it implemented under-the-hood. Does it use cloudquery ( https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery ) or steampipe ( https://github.com/turbot/steampipe ) under-the-hood or does it implement everything from scratch. Disclaimer: Im the founder of CloudQuery. I get why you would want to do select * from infra, but not sure I understand why you would want to do "insert * into infra" and not use something li…

It does sound like one of those "because it's cool" features rather than "because anyone should ever actually use this".

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#23

Post by neonlex »

bink wrote: post #21
yevpats wrote: post #18

Interesting how it implemented under-the-hood. Does it use cloudquery ( https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery ) or steampipe ( https://github.com/turbot/steampipe ) under-the-hood or does it implement everything from scratch. Disclaimer: Im the founder of CloudQuery. I get why you would want to do select * from infra, but not sure I understand why you would want to do "insert * into infra" and not use something li…

It does sound like one of those "because it's cool" features rather than "because anyone should ever actually use this".

Which part of what?

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#24

Post by bink »

stingraycharles wrote: post #5

What problem does this solve, as opposed to a git repositories? To me, declarative infrastructure management is incredibly important in order to reason about a deployment. Even though under the hood, yes, everything is stateful, it’s something I want abstracted away, not as a primary way of interacting with my infrastructure. I guess what I’m asking is what the canonical use case / target user of this is.

I think most large companies have written similar tools to deal with various use cases.

As part of a security team I often have the need to query for what instance has been assigned what IP, what team owns what AWS account, which security groups have port X open. You can do all of this using API queries but it's tedious, slow, and you can run the risk of hitting API rate limits. Most of this information is not easily queryable via Terraform and git.

At my last place we had a custom designed tool that would regularly fetch information from the AWS API and our CM servers and store it in a database. At my current place we have a tool that can query from CM but doesn't integrate with the AWS API so we're still doing things manually there. Having this database available via SQL is a tremendous help.

Now, the _write_ side of this I do not have a use case for.

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#25

Post by bob1029 »

This is really interesting to me. I absolutely love SQL and the power it has for modeling complexity.

I also don't think this whole thing has to be absolutely pure either... I would have no problems seeing user-defined functions that have side-effects in this kind of scope. You can certainly wrap a declarative + gateway pattern around domain registration or other global one-time deals, but perhaps exposing that side-effect to the SQL user would encourage more robust application development. Exception handling is something that is very hard to perfectly abstract away in a declarative sense.

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#26

Post by pombo »

gigatexal wrote: post #9
brodouevencode wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hit the sign up button at the top, scrolls me to the bottom but there's nothing there. Using Brave on Mac, even tried with blockers disabled.

yeah the button scrolls you to the bottom but there's no way to sign up.

ah it was a bug in some screens. we think we just fixed it. where you guys on mobile, can you check again?

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#27

Post by rubiquity »

I see a lot of criticisms for not wanting to use SQL to do writes and I think that is misguided. The current state of your infrastructure is absolutely state and SQL is a great language for working with state. While Terraform and all these other "declarative" infrastructure tools are better than what came before them, you're ultimately playing Relation Stitcher by needing to connect the various pieces together. There is nothing declarative about Terraform and others. Infrasturcture is absolutely stateful and relational so why not use SQL and relations to manage it?

There are mentions of other tools that address the read side, and that's useful for obvious reasons, but you've punted on the hard problem which is the writes. The key to getting writes right will be constraints and triggers. Constraints can absolutely help operators to not cause outages by creating guard rails around certain state mutations. Triggers are important because unlike data that never sees an update, infrastructure is living and being able to consume those changes is important.

I might just have confirmation bias because I have this idea written down and think it should exist. Regardless, good luck!

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#29

Post by tmp_anon_22 »

rubiquity wrote: post #27

I see a lot of criticisms for not wanting to use SQL to do writes and I think that is misguided. The current state of your infrastructure is absolutely state and SQL is a great language for working with state. While Terraform and all these other "declarative" infrastructure tools are better than what came before them, you're ultimately playing Relation Stitcher by needing to connect the various pieces together. There…

Infrastructure is quantum state. AWS APIs lie to you. Status pages lie to you. If I had a nickel every time the solution to a failing HTTP call was "just send it again"...

Use whatever tool you like: SQL, Rust, carrier-pigeon - but it wont be a panacea to solving cloud infrastructure.

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#30

Post by whoomp12342 »

yevpats wrote: post #18

Interesting how it implemented under-the-hood. Does it use cloudquery ( https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery ) or steampipe ( https://github.com/turbot/steampipe ) under-the-hood or does it implement everything from scratch. Disclaimer: Im the founder of CloudQuery. I get why you would want to do select * from infra, but not sure I understand why you would want to do "insert * into infra" and not use something li…

personally, I love terraform. I dont like statefiles though. Its annoying to have them in a vault system
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