dhall-kubernetes VS NUKE

One thing that might help you in this madness is:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Type safe, fat finger safe representation of your YAMLs is grossly underrated.

At the moment nothing like that exists. Eventually it should be possible to generate RCL types like https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes does for Dhall.

I hate yaml with a passion. It marginally better than xml for reading (wins huge on comment syntax) and worse for everything else. It makes zero sense we somehow ended up with it as standard configuration serialization format.

Note yaml is not a DSL. It's a tree serialization format! Everything interesting is happening after it is parsed. Extreme examples point to e.g. github actions conditions.

Anyway, back on topic - maybe not prolog for CDK, but still quite interesting: Dhall-kubernetes - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

At this point, if it’s painful enough, why isn’t compiling-to-yml tools more popular?

Example: https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Haven’t used dhall myself but I’d definitely prefer a DSL on top of yaml.

Dhall provides https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes which is exactly this: statically type-checked kubernetes config generation.

Dhall is my favorite configuration language that I never get around to using.

I manage DNS in Terraform, and since every Terraform provider uses different objects definitions, and every object definition is rather verbose, Dhall would be a way to specify my own DRY types and leave the provider-specific details in one place. Adding new DNS entries and moving several domains between providers would be a matter of changing fewer lines.

Dhall also has Kubernetes bindings:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Although I'm tempted to just stick to Helm here, even though it's less type-safe.

Not Helm directly, but does something like Dhall fit your question? https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Have you heard about Dhall? It’s a programming language used for generating configuration files for a variety of purposes. One of them is to replace old and limited formats such as JSON and YAML. It is DRYable, secure, and even suitable for creating K8s manifests. The latter option isn’t something for anyone: you have to learn a new language and deal with its peculiarities, but it might be really helpful when you have tons of YAML configs. I’ve recently made a short intro to Dhall for K8s in this review.

Best thing is Dhall that I am aware of. Same situation, working as a consultant, forced to use broken things.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Lets look at a specific example. Take Kubernetes: everything is yaml, with complete schemas, all the way down. From your perspective this is configuration utopia, right? Meanwhile back in reality k8s is the poster child of "yaml hell". From the day it was released, people took one look at it, gave it a giant NOPE and instantly spawned half a dozen templating languages. The most popular of these is helm, which has a terrible, no good, very bad design: full of potential injection attacks from purely textual string substitution, manually specified indentation to embed parameterized blocks, virtually no intermediate validation, no way to validate unused features, etc etc

Compare to dhall which publishes a complete set of dhall-k8s schema mappings which enables you to factor out any design you want down to as few configuration variables as you like, while validating the configuration generators themselves at design time. https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes#more-modular-...

Today, we will continue our journey with Nuke by adding new targets to the solution presented in Nuke: Deploy ASP.NET Web App to Azure. This time, we will deploy our application to a local Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

In this post, we will explore the benefits of Nuke and its most common features as we deploy a web app to Azure. Our goal is to achieve a flexible, maintainable, automated build process.

Is it similar to Nuke?

Another thing I could recommend is to use something like Nuke build system to automate more complex tasks that aren't good fit for csproj using C# code (for example - publishing and zipping self-contained release of some service for specific platform using current date and time or commit hash as version number).

testcontainers and https://github.com/dotnet/Docker.DotNet are on my to-do list to try out, but just like with something like https://nuke.build/ i can't see the value other than that the config would be c# instead of some flavour of yaml.

We started using https://nuke.build/. Early days so can’t comment too much but it seems good so far.