consul-template VS garden

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code tool. It is designed by HashiCorp and written in Go Programming Language. Terraform is used to automate the creation of DevOps infrastructure and tasks. Terraform provisions and configures your DevOps infrastructure. It spins up new servers, creates load balancers, and node groups, and performs network configurations. Terraform is mostly applied to provision resources on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It can automate and provision infrastructure on any cloud platform. We will use Terraform to set up an Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster that has all the necessary cloud resources.

It can be time-consuming to create and manage the infrastructure that drives your software applications as they grow and become larger. Also, what about ongoing updates and releases of new features? Luckily, there is a solution to this problem in the form of a tool designed by Hashicorp called Terraform. This allows us to define our infrastructure in a central configuration file without having to create it on every provider platform we use.

HashiCorp Sentinel: Sentinel is a PAC tool developed by HashiCorp that can be used in tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. Sentinel supports writing rules in programming languages such as HCL to automate the enforcement of security and compliance policies.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool (IAC) created by HashiCorp that lets you automate cloud and on-prem resources. It uses configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to declare resources (infrastructure objects) and define dependencies between them. To put it simply, this tool allows you to write a few configuration files and build a whole system’s architecture on the cloud by running a couple of commands. I found this to be a more efficient alternative to clicking through a console to create resources manually.

It was clear back in 2021 that Lob needed to consolidate how we run code and none of our current tools were up to the task; it wasn’t a matter of if Lob would upgrade to something new, but when. The Platform team kicked off a research project to find Lob’s next service platform. Forever ago (back in 2019) we investigated migrating to Kubernetes, a popular but notoriously difficult-to-manage tool for this sort of thing, but that project fizzled out for many reasons, forcing us to consider something else. We chose Nomad which offers a comparable feature set to Kubernetes in a much more streamlined package. Nomad is developed by HashiCorp, a leader in the DevOps space, and is used by companies like Pandora, Cloudflare, Internet Archive, and Roblox.

If however, you have an application service that needs support for 2+ ports, because you know, Kubernetes supports this, I would recommend avoiding Consul Connect, as it is not functional to meet minimum requirements for a service mesh. Perhaps someday, when Hashicorp prioritizes basic functionality and usability in future version, this product can be considered.

Looks a lot like Hashicorp (a technology company), maybe too similar, and not particularly evocative IMO.

AWS VPC is a simple example. This feature really shines when building reusable infrastructure-as-code for Network Firewall or even Network ACLs. Anything that simplifies something and reduces or eliminates any hacks required to reach a logical outcome is super valuable. Great work finally driving this one home HashiCorp.

Hey there! Have you tried garden.io for caching? We also cache tests. Pretty much anything that's possible to cache. We're open source at https://github.com/garden-io/garden

To add to what's already been said: If you think about it, CI pipelines are typically a complete description of how your system is built, tested, and deployed.

Which is pretty fantastic except for how walled off they are. You can't really re-use these descriptions for e.g. development, they're not vendor agnostic, and they only way to run them is by pushing your code.

Maybe it's a silly analogy but it's almost like being a web dev that doesn't have a browser and needs to send their code to a friend who can tell them if that font size looks good.

I think we're way over due for freeing these "blueprints" of our system from the confines of CI and making them portable and flexible. And containers are the technology that's enabling that.

Full disclaimer (as always): I work at Garden[0] where we're also solving that problem but taking a slightly different approach to Dagger (it's still a DAG). Garden config is declarative and the jobs (we call them actions) have a semantic meaning. You can e.g. have a Build action of type container or a Deploy action of type Helm and Garden will figure out what to do with it.

[0] https://github.com/garden-io/garden

Yes, there's us over at https://github.com/garden-io/garden! We're big believers in pipelines that run anywhere. I even made a short little video that should give you the gist. [1]

Some of the short-list of differences: we use YAML for our configuration language, Dagger can use full-fat languages to define its pipelines. Our feature scope is broader: you can use us to vend IDP-like stacks to your developers if you're a Platform Team; we make development with remote Kubernetes clusters very easy, including all the remote image builds; and we have a number of integrations so you can bring your IaC tool of choice (Pulumi, Terraform) into your pipeline and set up service -> infra dependencies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnan6s2cDg

Me too. In fact Garden (dev tooling for the Kubernetes)[0] is a Berlin start-up with three Icelandic founders.

And if I'm not mistaken, two of us worked briefly with @halldorel (above commenter) at an earlier Icelandic start-up. It's a small world (if you're Icelandic).

[0] https://garden.io

There are dedicated tools just for that. Apart from skaffold check also tilt.dev, garden.io, devspace.sh, okteto.com

Would appreciate any insights on garden.io. Thanks.

Telepresence, tilt, garden.io, okteto, skaffold etc.

- https://garden.io/

haha, do my pictures give off a strong not-web-dev vibe? Either way your right, I'm focusing on devxp and automation for kubernetes. Because my work is open source you can see it here https://github.com/garden-io/garden (btw we're also hiring another open core dev like me)