mazzle VS plac

I've been experimenting with alternative pipeline syntaxes.

One example is using Graphviz graph files as an execution plan for software deployments. You can see a graph here:

https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/archite...

I wrote code with networkx to parse this graph dot file and then follow the plan topologically, spinning up packer, terraform, bash scripts, compilation and so on. It also executes graph nodes in parallel where it can.

I talk about it here https://devops-pipeline.com/

My problem with bash pipelines is passing data along and referring to previous steps' data. You kind of need to enrich the data that goes along the pipeline.

I use Graphviz dot syntax to configure entire cloud computing environments in the order they must be built. This is pipelines as code and infrastructure as code

It's very powerful! Not every organisation can bring up an entire environment with one command.

Here is a executable diagram of a build worker cloud nodes, Kubernetes, consul, vault, Debian package server, Java app, SSH bastion, Prometheus, grafana, DNS and security groups.

https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/archite...

The tool also parallelises the build based on the graph so packer builds can run in parallel.

https://devops-pipeline.com/

It also has a GUI but it's not ready for other people to use.

I use a tool I wrote to layer my infrastructure with layers called components and I configure it with a Graphviz file.

My tool, called mazzle (previously devops-pipeline) would run parts of the graph that can run in parallel in parallel. It can also run parts of the build on SSH workers. You bring up the workers at the beginning of the build.

Here's an example of a graph generated from graphviz file: https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/archite...

This graph brings up a hashicorp vault server, Java application, bastion proxy etc.

here's the graphviz file: https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle-starter/blob/master/arch...

It describes the ordering of the infrastructure, the invocation of Ansible, packer, shell scripts to set up vault etc.

The idea is to be able to bring up a new environment by changing one parameter. There's a React GUI too.

https://devops-pipeline.com

The proposed solution of an API with a thinly wrapped auto-generated CLI is not terrible. I have heard it is common within Google, for example.

In the Python world, there are various solutions starting from https://github.com/ialbert/plac or https://argh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and moving on to https://github.com/pallets/click or https://github.com/Lucretiel/autocommand and probably N others.

Personally, I prefer Nim to Python which has https://github.com/c-blake/cligen. As mentioned in https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/blob/master/MOTIVATION.md, but not in the article, the overhead of dispatch to a program in shell REPLs can also be thousands to millions of times higher than an API call.