cuezel VS pipeline

I played with a similar idea a while ago: https://github.com/ecordell/cuezel/ (cuezel as in: "Bazel but with CUE"), but I was never sure that what I was doing was in the spirit of CUE.

CUE pushes nondeterminism into "_tool.cue"[0] files that are allowed to do things like IO and run external processes. Tool files scratch a similar itch to Makefiles, but they lack an integrated plugin system like Bazel (hence why I played with the idea of CUE + Bazel).

With Dagger you seem to be restricted to the set of things that the dagger tool can interpret just with like my Cuezel tool you are limited to what I happened to implement.

In CUE `_tool` files you are also limited to the set of things that the tool builtins provide, but the difference is that you know that the rest of the CUE program is deterministic/pure (everything not in a _tool file).

There's clearly value in tooling that reads CUE definitions, and dagger is the first commercial interest in CUE that I've seen, which is exciting.

But I'm most interested in some CUE-interpreter meta-tool that would allow you to import cue definitions + their interpreters and version them together, but for use in `_tool` files to keep the delineation clear. Maybe this is where dagger is heading? (if so it wasn't clear from the docs)

[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/cuelang.org/[email protected]/pkg/tool

Tekton

Tekton is an open-source framework for creating efficient CI/CD systems. This empowers developers to seamlessly construct, test, and deploy applications across various cloud environments and on-premise setups.

Despite other alternatives like Circle CI, Travis CI, GitLab CI or even self-hosted options using open-source projects like Tekton or Argo Workflow, the reason for choosing GitHub Actions was straightforward: GitHub Actions, in conjunction with the GitHub ecosystem, offers a user-friendly experience and access to a rich software marketplace.

[2]: https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/issues/5507#issuecommen...

Drone, or Tekton, Argo Workflows if you’re on k8s

If you want a step up, I would recommend trying out Tekton Pipelines. It’s a very popular ci tool, and it runs on Kubernetes. Yes, this would involve setting up a Kubernetes cluster but please don’t run for the hills! You can setup a Kubernetes cluster and install Tekton on top of it with minimal setup using minikube (see here. This would be a great joint exercise as it will give you a bit of Kubernetes understanding alongside it, and the mechanisms of Tekton are a little trickier than GitHub actions imo. It’s all much the same though.

I've recently found this quote by Kelsey Hightower:

"I'm convinced the majority of people managing infrastructure just want a PaaS. The only requirement: it has to be built by them."

Source: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/85193508753294540...

In the last few weeks, I've experimented a bit with Flux (https://fluxcd.io/), Tekton (https://tekton.dev/) and Cloud Native Buildpacks (https://buildpacks.io/) on how to provide K8s powered git push deployments without using a dedicated CI/CD server.

My project is still in early alpha stage and just a proof of concept :-) My vision is to expand it into an Open Source PaaS in the future.

Do you think the above quote is true? What does an open source PaaS need to be like in order to be accepted by software developers?

Some other projects have been discontinued in the past (like Flynn or Deis) or were created before the Kubernetes era.

Is it the right direction to provide a Heroku like solution based on K8s or is it better to provide an Open Source Infrastructure as Code library with building blocks to avoid everything from scratch?