hcl VS swarmpit

Terraform HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is an essential language for cloud engineers in 2024, particularly for those involved in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices. HCL is the configuration language used by Terraform, a widely adopted tool that enables engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration approach. Learning Terraform HCL allows cloud engineers to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of cloud resources across various service providers, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability of cloud environments.

Reminds me of [HCL](https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl), but without all the providers to deploy the config?

HCL: A Go implementation structured configuration language. The native syntax of HCL is inspired by libucl and nginx configurations. It is used to create a structured configuration language that is friendly to humans and machines, mainly for DevOps tools, server configurations, and resource configurations as a Terraform language.

HCL has a JSON representation [1], internally, objects behave that way. so it should be possible to write a Jsonnet wrapper around it. Terraform can currently parse json pipelines too.

[1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/json/spec.md

>https://noyaml.com/

I'm not sure this is the criticism you think it is. Wow, so you basically have to add quotes to get strings in some ambiguous situations?

Yeah sure you could probably improve YAML by getting rid of these weird pitfalls, but that is a minor improvement. The alternative isn't something like TOML, because YAML is optimized for hierarchical configuration. It's every vendor implementing a different syntax such as Hashicorp with their HCL [0].

[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

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.

Format is HCL language feature: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/hclwrite/public.go

Hi, from what I read from HCL Github "HCL is a syntax and API specifically designed for building structured configuration formats.".

When the desired state is relatively simple to define and the mechanism to reach that state is not that important, writing up a declaration of what is needed and letting something/someone else deal with it is the most logical abstraction. This would be like drafting up the architectural draft for your new restaurant and paying a contracting company to actually build it, or writing HTML and letting a web browser render it, or writing a Terraform HCL file and letting the Terraform CLI tool apply it. This is called declarative programming in the software world, and has many advantages (and a few disadvantages!) for cloud infrastructure management.

So I need to setup prometheus, granfana, node exporter, and cadvisor before running this? All of the above give me everything I need to monitor a swarmcluster. And if I want multi-user access to the graphs, I’d configure auth in Grafana.

Further, if I were to monitor Swarm without the Prom+Grafana stack, I’d be looking at:

https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit

What is the value-add of Storm?

And then also look at Swarmpit https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit. It was last updated Aug 28, 2020 as well, so I don't know how active it is, but I also used it for a while before sticking with Portainer ultimately.

Kubernetes is a bit overkill. For my homegrown usage i use docker swarm. And use https://swarmpit.io to manage it

Specific to swarm but it might help soneone in a way https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit

> There is gap in the market between VM oriented simple deployments and kubernetes based setup.

In my experience, there are actually two platforms that do this pretty well.

First, there's Docker Swarm ( https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/ ) - it comes preinstalled with Docker, can handle either single machine deployments or clusters, even multi-master deployments. Furthermore, it just adds a few values to Docker Compose YAML format ( https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3... ) , so it's incredibly easy to launch containers with it. And there are lovely web interfaces, such as Portainer ( https://www.portainer.io/ ) or Swarmpit ( https://swarmpit.io/ ) for simpler management.

Secondly, there's also Hashicorp Nomad ( https://www.nomadproject.io/ ) - it's a single executable package, which allows similar setups to Docker Swarm, integrates nicely with service meshes like Consul ( https://www.consul.io/ ), and also allows non-containerized deployments to be managed, such as Java applications and others ( https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers ). The only serious downsides is having to use the HCL DSL ( https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl ) and their web UI being read only in the last versions that i checked.

There are also some other tools, like CapRover ( https://caprover.com/ ) available, but many of those use Docker Swarm under the hood and i personally haven't used them. Of course, if you still want Kubernetes but implemented in a slightly simpler way, then there's also the Rancher K3s project ( https://k3s.io/ ) which packages the core of Kubernetes into a smaller executable and uses SQLite by default for storage, if i recall correctly. I've used it briefly and the resource usage was indeed far more reasonable than that of full Kubernetes clusters (like RKE).

I believer Portainer and Swarmpit would have this capabilties https://www.portainer.io/ https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit