ecs-blueprints VS dhall-lang

I’ve been spending a week trying to learn how to deploy a collection of containers (my web app, a Postgres DB, and some microservices) to AWS and I am still so lost.

The first solution I happened upon was serverless. Specifically SST, which is written with AWS CDK, but you must develop on live services and I just can’t justify paying to develop.

Then I found Serverless Framework, which is an abstraction on CloudFormation, but the offline solutions like localstack get a lot of flack for being buggy and localstack charges for some services. I also looked into Architect but the documentation is abysmal.

Then I figured serverful might be the easier way to go. I found that docker compose has a built in integration with AWS ECS where it transforms your yaml into Cloudformation to provision the right services. However, it seems to just be missing key parts like custom domain and SSL certificate provisioning which seems to defeat the IaC ethos.

Then I figured I might go with Terraform and I found some seemingly good starters like https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-ecs-blueprints https://github.com/cloudposse/terraform-aws-ecs-web-app https://github.com/turnerlabs/terraform-ecs-fargate but the examples are just lacking. They don’t have any examples for multiple containers that can access each others’ resources that I can find. Reading these templates has at least given me a better idea of the resources I need to provision in AWS but the networking and configuration still frighten me. Like do I need to configure nginx with a reverse proxy myself? How do I orchestrate that container with the others? And apparently services can crash and just not restart? And I need to make sure to configure volumes for data that needs to persist. And setting up the CI/CD seems daunting.

I’ve also heard about docker swarm, kubernetes, pulumi, AWS SAM, etc but it’s a lot to learn. When I go on Discords for web frameworks, mostly everyone including the devs of these frameworks use 2nd tier managed providers like Vercel, Fly, Netlify, Supabase, Cloudflare, etc. But many of those are just not as reliable as core cloud providers and the cost is way higher. Glad to see I’m not alone in a very reasonable expectation of a simple way to orchestrate multiple containers on AWS, what must be the most common use case web developers have

Fail to see how this is any different than Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) other than it produces plists too.

Kubernetes config is a decent example. I had ChatGPT generate a representative silly example -- the content doesn't matter so much as the structure:

https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/528b00cd5c3a22e3d8f057bb1a7...

Now consider 100s (if not 1000s) of such files.

I haven't given Pkl an in depth look yet, but I can say that the Industry Standard™ of "simple YAML" + string substitution (with delicate, error prone indentation -- since YAML is indentation sensitive) is easily beat by any of:

- https://jsonnet.org/

- https://nickel-lang.org/

- https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html

- https://dhall-lang.org/

- (insert many more here, probably including Pkl)

There are underpowered languages / tools, that can only solve a problem for which they are intended poorly. But not all limited tools are like that.

Say, eBPF is prominently not Turing-complete, which allows to guarantee that a eBPF program terminates, and even how soon. Still eBPF is hugely useful in its area.

Or, say, regular expressions are limited to regular languages; in particular, they famously [1] cannot process recursive structures, like trees. Still tools like grep / ag / rg are mightily useful.

Yes, I agree that YAML is underpowered for proper k8s configuration! But it's also too powerful for its own good in other aspects [2]. I wish Google used Dhall [3] or their own purely functional config language (FCL? I already forgot the name) instead of YAML; sadly, they did not.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/223424

[2]: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...

[3]: https://dhall-lang.org/

Dhall: Dhall is a programmable configuration language that combines features like JSON, functions, types, and import capabilities. Its style leans towards functional programming, so if you're familiar with functional-style languages such as Haskell, you might find Dhall to be quite intuitive.

I've been thinking along these lines but more 'strongly validated' than statically typed in the sense that you'd be better off being able to load the entire config and then produce a list of problems (and should be able to offer good editor support if done correctly).

Though https://dhall-lang.org/ demonstrates that you can statically type quite a lot of configuration to great advantage, which appears to be programmatically embeddable in multiple languages per https://docs.dhall-lang.org/howtos/How-to-integrate-Dhall.ht...

> Where practical is in the sense of an engineer (or in their terms, a CS practitioner),

Configuration processing. E.g. I'd like my yamls to be decidable, though I'd settle for guaranteed to halt[1].

[1] https://dhall-lang.org/

Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).

Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/

A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet

And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/