constructs VS cue

To "meet developers where they are" is a beautiful tenet of AWS, and of the CDK, and inspired us to create awesome technology such as JSII and constructs.

I agree with constructs, I recommend using both (article mentions). Create your template, you might have various CDK constructs (community, AWS, personal), the template will produce a full project how you / your org want it. This might include your github actions for linting, cdk synth, testing, deployment etc. Application source (Lambda, API, container etc). Anyone in your team or external should be able to take that template and produce a project that is the same.

Have you heard of or explored https://github.com/aws/constructs (related: https://github.com/aws/jsii and https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk)?

This is what CDK uses for declarative modeling, but gives the opportunity to use languages/tooling that most devs are already familiar with. CDK8s already uses it as a replacement for yaml (technically, the yaml becomes an implementation detail rather than actually replaced)

All CDKs are based on Amazon's Constructs, (which also uses projen). They come with a CLI and Development Kit (API). In short, you set up an Object in code and then synthesize the representation to disk. This opens up the full power of programming languages. If you are sick of the issues with terraform, CloudFormation Templates, troposphere, Azure Blue Prints, or the like then this is for you.

If you are in a situation where you have a backend and you want to expose an API and then you would eventually want a client, you would need format specs as the starting point where server and clients are generated from that one source.

At the moment, OpenAPI with YAML is the only way to go but you can't easily split the spec into separate files as you would do any program with packages, modules and what not.

There are third party tools[0] which are archived and the libraries they depend upon are up for adoption.

In that space, either you can use something like cue language 1] or something like TypeSpec which is purpose built for this so yet, this seems like a great tool although I have not tried it yet myself.

[0]. https://github.com/APIDevTools/swagger-cli

[1]. https://cuelang.org/

EDIT: formating

Where `kube.cue` sets reasonable defaults (e.g. image is /). The "cluster" runs on a mini PC in my basement, and I have a small Digital Ocean VM with a static IP acting as an ingress (networking via Tailscale). Backups to cloud storage with restic, alerting/monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana, Caddy/Tailscale for local ingress.

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

[2] https://cuelang.org/

I've been somewhat surprised that CUE bills itself as "tooling friendly" and doesn't yet have a language server- the number one bit of tooling most devs use for a particular language.

I'm assuming it's becaus CUE is still unstable?

Anyway, if others are interested in CUE's LSP work, I think https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/issues/142 is the issue to subscribe to

This is where I usually pitch in with "Have your heard of CUELang, our lord and savior?": https://cuelang.org/

- Not turing complete

CUE: The core problem CUE solves is "type checking", which is mainly used in configuration constraint verification scenarios and simple cloud native configuration scenarios.

If you really want executable configurations please consider a newer language like https://dascript.org or https://cuelang.org which provide better type safety.

1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38030778

Markdown and XML are nice, but what about more advanced documentation formats like OpenAPI? For one recent project, I set up automatic generation of the OpenAPI docs from (much more compact and flexible) CUE definitions (https://cuelang.org/) - which has the bonus of also being able to test the API against the definitions. JetBrains has a CUE plugin, but it's really barebones (doesn't even support jumping from the usage of a schema to its definition). Of course the possibilities when generating docs are endless (just think of the various syntaxes for doc comments, embedding examples/tests in source code etc.)...

It doesn't include validators for TOML and INI, but if you're doing JSON and YAML, I would take a look at using or building upon CUE (https://cuelang.org/). It is a different take on schema definition (plus more), and is surprising terse and powerful model.