kapp VS homebrew

Compare kapp vs homebrew and see what are their differences.

kapp

kapp is a simple deployment tool focused on the concept of "Kubernetes application" — a set of resources with the same label (by carvel-dev)

homebrew

Provides tools from https://carvel.dev via Homebrew package. (by carvel-dev)
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kapp homebrew
7 1
852 7
1.1% -
8.1 8.1
6 days ago 7 days ago
Go Ruby
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

kapp

Posts with mentions or reviews of kapp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-07-28.
  • HELM vs KUSTOMIZE
    8 projects | /r/kubernetes | 28 Jul 2022
  • How to handle the lifecycle of multiple COTS
    3 projects | /r/kubernetes | 27 Jul 2022
    If you want to take it one step further: you might be applying several resources at a time that are logically one "application". kapp (https://carvel.dev/kapp/) lets you group those together and give them a name, and provides a "terraform-like" experience where it shows you its execution plan before applying updates. So then you might do `ytt -f | kapp deploy -a name-of-thing` Or you could use helm's templating engine but then still pass the resulting yaml to kapp for its unification of the deployment step.
  • Dhall: A Gateway Drug to Haskell
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jun 2022
    since you mentioned Kubernetes...

    > It would be nice if there was a separate state reconciliation system that one could adapt to use with Cue or Dhall or any other frontend

    this exactly was thinking behind https://carvel.dev/kapp for Kubernetes (i'm one of the maintainers). it makes a point to not know how you decided to generate your Kubernetes config -- just takes it as input.

    > In particular the ability to import other files as semantic hashes seems like a great feature.

    it's an interesting feature but seems like it should be unnecessary given that config can be easily checked into git (your own and its dependencies).

  • Terraform should have remained stateless
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2022
    i think kubernetes is not a great example in favor of more client state (like tf) since k8s has uniform resource structure (metadata.*) and first class labeling support. but as you point out kubectl doesnt use labels well (at least imho).

    when building https://carvel.dev/kapp (which i think of as "optimized terraform" for k8s) the goal was absolutely to take advantage of those k8s features. we ended up providing two capabilities: direct label (more advanced) and "app name" (more user friendly). from impl standpoint, difference is how much state is maintained.

    "kapp deploy -a label:x=y -f ..." allows user to specify label that is applied to all deployed resources and is also used for querying k8s to determine whats out there under given label. invocation is completely stateless since burden of keeping/providing state (in this case the label x=y) is shifted to the user. downside of course is that all apis within k8s need to be iterated over. (side note, fun features like "kapp delete -a label:!x" are free thanks to k8s querying).

    "kapp deploy -a my-app -f ..." gives user ability to associate name with uniquely auto-generated label. this case is more stateful than previous but again only label needs to be saved (we use ConfigMap to store that label). if this state is lost, one has to only recover generated label.

    imho k8s api structure enables focused tools like kapp to be much much simpler than more generic tool like terraform. as much as i'd like for terraform to keep less state, i totally appreciate its needs to support lowest common denominator feature set.

    common discussion topics:

  • Deploy Neo4J's APOC plugin with code thanks to CARVEL vendir
    21 projects | dev.to | 4 Jul 2021
    kapp - Install, upgrade, and delete multiple Kubernetes resources as one "application"
  • Open Application Model – An open standard for defining cloud native apps
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2021
    I really like this approach for simplifying Kubernetes. A few projects similar to OAM in that it provides a higher level "Application" CRD:

    https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kapp

homebrew

Posts with mentions or reviews of homebrew. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-07-04.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing kapp and homebrew you can also consider the following projects:

kubevela - The Modern Application Platform.

argo-cd - Declarative Continuous Deployment for Kubernetes

Flux - Successor: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2

vendir - Easy way to vendor portions of git repos, github releases, helm charts, docker image contents, etc. declaratively

kapp-controller - Continuous delivery and package management for Kubernetes.

ytt - YAML templating tool that works on YAML structure instead of text

carvel - Carvel provides a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration, and deployment to Kubernetes. This repo contains information regarding the Carvel open-source community.

guestbook-example-on-kubernetes - K8s guestbook example deployed with k14s tools

imgpkg - Store application configuration files in Docker/OCI registries

terraform-provider-carvel - Carvel Terraform provider with resources for ytt and kapp to template and deploy to Kubernetes

asdf - k14s asdf plugin