Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
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Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#2> Use Javascript, a true programming language, no more YAML or Domain Specific language.
This appears to be a jab at Terraform but Terraform's declarative language is supposed to be a step forward from ad-hoc provisioning scripts. One of the issues with imperative scripts is you have to be mindful of intermediate state whereas Terraform allows the users to just think about the initial and final state.
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#3> Use Javascript, a true programming language, no more YAML or Domain Specific language. This appears to be a jab at Terraform but Terraform's declarative language is supposed to be a step forward from ad-hoc provisioning scripts. One of the issues with imperative scripts is you have to be mindful of intermediate state whereas Terraform allows the users to just think about the initial and final state.
Pretty much this. I don't know any DevOps engineers begging to make their configs even less readable
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#4> Use Javascript, a true programming language, no more YAML or Domain Specific language. This appears to be a jab at Terraform but Terraform's declarative language is supposed to be a step forward from ad-hoc provisioning scripts. One of the issues with imperative scripts is you have to be mindful of intermediate state whereas Terraform allows the users to just think about the initial and final state.
I must say that I prefer the declarative nature of terraform, but it's true that in many cases I've spend ages trying to create variables through loops, whereas in a regular programming language it would have taken me minutes. And sometimes I also face things impossible to do.
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#5> Use Javascript, a true programming language, no more YAML or Domain Specific language. This appears to be a jab at Terraform but Terraform's declarative language is supposed to be a step forward from ad-hoc provisioning scripts. One of the issues with imperative scripts is you have to be mindful of intermediate state whereas Terraform allows the users to just think about the initial and final state.
I use simple Bash or Python scripts while prototyping, then Terraform for anything that needs maintenance in production.
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#6I must try this out, this graph thing might save me a lot of headaches trying to understand previous DevOps engineer
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#7> Use Javascript, a true programming language, no more YAML or Domain Specific language. This appears to be a jab at Terraform but Terraform's declarative language is supposed to be a step forward from ad-hoc provisioning scripts. One of the issues with imperative scripts is you have to be mindful of intermediate state whereas Terraform allows the users to just think about the initial and final state.
> declarative language is supposed to be a step forward from ad-hoc provisioning scripts.
The best config systems I've seen leverage a programatic framework to generate declarative JSON/YAML. Rather than needing to bolt one on top.
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#8Seems like a potentially useful tool. Another related approach is https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer ("reverse Terraform"), which might be better if your end goal is to build Terraform scripts for existing infra.
However I like the idea of using these visualizations to grok or monitor infra; say as a Platform or Security engineering team, you might want to keep an eye on specific classes of resource like storage buckets, load balancers, etc.
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#9A while ago I started using the AWS CDK and never looked back, I can write all the infrastructure code in a real programming language with auto complete and proper IDE support, no more hacky YAML syntax for simple if statements!
Issue with using config for these things is that more complex structures don't scale that well, in code you can do abstractions to make everything easier to reason about.
Re: Show HN: Generate code and diagrams from live infrastructure, AWS/Azure/GCP
#10A while ago I started using the AWS CDK and never looked back, I can write all the infrastructure code in a real programming language with auto complete and proper IDE support, no more hacky YAML syntax for simple if statements! Issue with using config for these things is that more complex structures don't scale that well, in code you can do abstractions to make everything easier to reason about. https://aws.amazon.c…
And then there are projects like CDK-Dia that are taking infra documentation one step further.