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Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

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31–40 of 113 posts

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#31
I can see SELECTs being useful here, but yeesh INSERT/UPDATE/DELETEs would scare the heck out of me.

Also not clear on how/why this would be a SaaS product - this seems like it's a library you would download, throw some keys at, and thanks.

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#32

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.

Everything in the real world is quantum state but that doesn’t stop every SaaS application out there from using an RDBMS as their system of record. This is why we have reconciliation processes. Terraform state files are just an ad-hoc storage format without any of the features that SQL and RDBMS have had for decades (I don’t mean to pick on terraform so much, it’s just the one I’m most familiar with).

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everything in the real world is quantum state but that doesn’t stop every SaaS application out there from using an RDBMS as their system of record. This is why we have reconciliation processes. Terraform state files are just an ad-hoc storage format without any of the features that SQL and RDBMS have had for decades (I don’t mean to pick on terraform so much, it’s just the one I’m most familiar with).

Like someone else says, SELECTs make sense, INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE to manage infrastructure state, rather than using “proper” infrastructure as code, sounds like a path to hell to me.

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#35

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…

It kind of already exists... Libvirt is basically a database under the covers. If anything I'm surprised the implementation isn't "AWS backend for libvirt" > "sql frontend for libvirt"

In a past life I was managing virtual machines in elixir and not too long after writing a libvirt adapter I realized that what I should be doing is frontending libvirt with ecto (elixirs database tool)

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#37

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.

Everything is "quantum state". You do a database fetch and in the time that the result travels over the wire to the FE another node could have made a mutation.

The nice thing is that adapters to sql engines often have exactly the sort of protections you want baked in, e.g. "check to make sure the updated at timestamps match before committing an update"

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's using an implied cross join so each image is deployed onto a t2.micro

Ahh, gotcha. I appreciate the response there as I wasn't aware of that notation and even then I can't think of any time I've used a cross join. Not sure which syntax I would use personally.

> I've used a cross join

They're good for getting rates on small datasets. think (select grouper, count(1) from data) cross join select count(1) from data) I think I've mostly used them in interviews, tbh.

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#39

Steampipe ( https://steampipe.io ) is an open source CLI to query cloud infrastructure using SQL (e.g. AWS, GitHub, Slack, k8s, etc). It also has a HCL language to define security benchmarks and controls (e.g. AWS CIS, etc). We are a Postgres FDW under the hood with Go-based plugins, so write would be possible, but we've chosen to focus on read only so far. Definitely interested to see how you approach create, update…

As someone who has to do lots of compliance activities, this is a fantastic tool, thanks!

Re: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

#40

Steampipe ( https://steampipe.io ) is an open source CLI to query cloud infrastructure using SQL (e.g. AWS, GitHub, Slack, k8s, etc). It also has a HCL language to define security benchmarks and controls (e.g. AWS CIS, etc). We are a Postgres FDW under the hood with Go-based plugins, so write would be possible, but we've chosen to focus on read only so far. Definitely interested to see how you approach create, update…

As someone who has to do lots of compliance activities, this is a fantastic tool, thanks!

Great to hear :-) Please check out our open source mods (e.g. AWS Compliance, GitHub Sherlock, DigitalOcean Thrifty) - we'd love your feedback & help! https://hub.steampipe.io/mods
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