Concourse VS sealed-secrets

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> Why bother, when Dagger caches everything automatically?

The fear with needing to run `npm ci` (or better, `pnpm install`) before running dagger is on the amount of time required to get this step to run. Sure, in the early days, trying out toy examples, when the only dependencies are from dagger upstream, very little time at all. But what happens when I start pulling more and more dependencies from the Node ecosystem to build the Dagger pipeline? Your documentation includes examples like pulling in `@google-cloud/run` as a dependency: https://docs.dagger.io/620941/github-google-cloud#step-3-cre... and similar for Azure: https://docs.dagger.io/620301/azure-pipelines-container-inst... . The more dependencies brought in - the longer `npm ci` is going to take on GitHub Actions. And it's pretty predictable that, in a complicated pipeline, the list of dependencies is going to get pretty big - at least a dependency per infrastructure provider we use, plus inevitably all the random Node dependencies that work their way into any Node project, like eslint, dotenv, prettier, testing dependencies... I think I have a reasonable fear that `npm ci` just for the Dagger pipeline will hit multiple minutes, and then developers who expect linting and similar short-run jobs to finish within 30 seconds are going to wonder why they're dealing with this overhead.

It's worth noting that one of Concourse's problems was, even with webhooks setup for GitHub to notify Concourse to begin a build, Concourse's design required it to dump the contents of the webhook and query the GitHub API for the same information (whether there were new commits) before starting a pipeline and cloning the repository (see: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/2240 ). And that was for a CI/CD system where, for all YAML's faults, for sure one of its strengths is that it doesn't require running `npm ci`, with all its associated slowness. So please take it on faith that, if even a relatively small source of latency like that was felt in Concourse, for sure the latency from running `npm ci` will be felt, and Dagger's users (DevOps) will be put in an uncomfortable place where they need to defend the choice of Dagger from their users (developers) who go home and build a toy example on AlternateCI which runs what they need much faster.

> I will concede that Dagger’s clustering capabilities are not great yet

Herein my argument. It's not that I'm not convinced that building pipelines in a general-purpose programming language is a better approach compared to YAML, it's that building pipelines is tightly coupled with the infrastructure that runs the pipelines. One aspect of that is scaling up compute to meet the requirements dictated by the pipeline. But another aspect is that `npm ci` should not be run before submitting the pipeline code to Dagger, but after submitting the pipeline code to Dagger. Dagger should be responsible for running `npm ci`, just like Concourse was responsible for doing all the interpolation of the `((var))` syntax (i.e. you didn't need to run some kind of templating before submitting the YAML to Concourse). If Dagger is responsible for running `npm ci` (really, `pnpm install`), then it can maintain its own local pnpm store / pipeline dependency caching, which would be much faster, and overcome any shortcomings in the caching system of GitHub Actions or whatever else is triggering it.

> Imagine you live in a world where no part of the build has to repeat unless the changes actually impacted it. A world in which all builds happened with automatic parallelism. A world in which you could reproduce very reliably any part of the build on your laptop.

That sounds similar to https://concourse-ci.org/

I quite like it, but it never seemed to gain traction outside of Cloud Foundry.

I used Concourse[0] for a while. No real complaints, the visibility is nice but the functionality isn't anything new.

[0] https://concourse-ci.org/

We run https://concourse-ci.org/ on our own hardware at our office. (as a side note, running your own hardware, you realise just how abysmally slow most cloud servers are.)

Concourse: https://concourse-ci.org

We use https://concourse-ci.org/ at the moment and have been reasonably happy with it, however it only has support for linux containers at the moment, no windows containers. (MacOS doesn't have a containers primitive yet unfortunately)

If you have noticed, you are setting secrets in plain text on the application-configmap.yml file, which is not ideal and is not a best practice for security. The best way to do this securely would be to use AWS Secrets Manager, an external service like HashiCorp Vault, or Sealed Secrets. To learn more about these methods see the blog post Shhhh... Kubernetes Secrets Are Not Really Secret!.

Yeah documentation is hard and I'm guilty (as a former maintainer of SealedSecrets)

SealedSecrets was designed with "write only" secrets in mind.

Turns out a lot of people need to access the current secrets because they need to update a part of a "composite" secret.

There are two kinds of "composite" secrets, one easy and one harder, but if you don't know how to do it, even the easier is hard:

1. Secret with multiple data "items" (also called keys in K8s Secret jargon but that's confusing when there is encryption involved). I.e. good old "data":{"foo": "....", "bar": "..."}

2. Secrets where data within one item is actually a config file with cleartext and secrets mixed up in one single string (usually some JSON or YAML or TOML)

Case 1 is "easy" to deal with once you realize that sealed secrets files are just text files and you can just manually merge and update encryoted data items. We even created a "merge" and some "raw" encryption APIs to make that process a little less "copy pasta" but it's still hard to have a good UX that works for everyone.

Case 2 is harder. We did implement a data templating feature that allows you to generate a config file via a go-template that keeps the cleartext parts in clear and uses templating directives to inject the secret parts where you want (referencing the encrypted the items)

The main problem with case 2 is that it's undocumented.

The feature landed in 2021:

https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets/pull/580

I noticed that people at my current $dayjob used sealed secrets for years and it took me a while to understand that the reason they hated it was that they didn't know about that fundamental feature.

And how to blame them!? It's still undocumented!

In my defense I spent so much effort before and after I left VMware to lobby so that the project got the necessary staffing so it wouldn't die of bitrot that I didn't have much time left to work on documentation. Which is a bit said and probably just an excuse :-)

That said, I'm happy that the project is alive and the current maintainers are taking care of it against the forces of entropy. Perhaps some doc work would be useful too. Unfortunately I don't have time for now.

This might be OT, and forgive me, but I think one of the best practices for Encrypting and Managing secrets in Kubernetes is to use Sealed Secrets, they allow your secrets to be securely stored in git with the rest of the configuration and yet no one with access to the Git repository will be able to read them. I say this might be OT, because Sealed Secrets are trying to mitigate a different threat, the threat of the secrets at rest somewhere, and not "live in the cluster", where in theory all the ingredients to decrypt the secrets would still live.

The addition of Consul and Vault gives me a few things. For one, right now I'm handling secrets with a mixture of SOPS and Sealed Secrets. I use Vault in my professional life, and have used both Vault and Consul at my last job. Vault is a beast, so I may as well get better at it; plus its options for secret injection are better.

Use Sealed Secrets Operator.

sealed-secrets (sealed)

An option that easily works with GitOps is the Operator Sealed Secrets from Bitnami. Secrets encrypted with it can only be decrypted by operators running inside the cluster, not even by the original author. For encryption, there is a CLI (and a third-party web UI) that requires a connection to the cluster. The disadvantage of this is that the key material is stored in the cluster, the secrets are bound to the cluster and one has to take care of backups and operation.