octoDNS VS skycfg

Change to a supported provider for octoDNS. I've done some automating of bind files using Jinja2/Ansible, but I had to roll my own.

I'd use OctoDNS with the ZoneFileSource to parse the zone files into the YAML files so I have structured data to work with, then I'd write a script to loop through each one and generate the above var.records data structure for each

We use https://github.com/octodns/octodns for some of our DNS records. It's flexible, much faster than Terraform for thousands of records, and the maintainer Ross has been responsive on issues and pull requests. Also see Cloudflare's blog for how they use it

OctoDNS https://github.com/octodns/octodns

Have them all hot and live rather than any sort of failover system. Keep everything in sync with OctoDNS or similar

https://github.com/octodns/octodns

Finally, you could explore the use of third-party sync tools - https://github.com/octodns/octodns might be a good choice.

I can definitely sympathize here - in every context, just straight JSON/YAML configuration seems never expressive enough, but the tooling created in response always seems to come with sharp edges.

Here are some of the things I appreciate about Jsonnet:

- It evals to JSON, so even though the semantics of the language are confusing, it is reasonably easy to eval and iterate on some Jsonnet until it emits what one is expecting - and after that, it's easy to create some validation tests so that regressions don't occur.

- It takes advantage of the fact that JSON is a lowest-common-denominator for many data serialization formats. YAML is technically a superset of JSON, so valid JSON is also valid YAML. Proto3 messages have a canonical JSON representation, so JSON can also adhere to protobuf schemas. This covers most "serialized data structure" use-cases I typically encounter (TOML and HCL are outliers, but many tools that accept those also accept equivalent JSON). This means that with a little bit of build-tool duct-taping, Jsonnet can be used to generate configurations for a wide variety of tooling.

- Jsonnet is itself a superset of JSON - so those more willing to write verbose JSON than learn Jsonnet can still write JSON that someone else can import/use elsewhere. Using Jsonnet does not preclude falling back to JSON.

- The tooling works well - installing the Jsonnet VSCode plugin brings in a code formatter that does an excellent job, and rules_jsonnet[0] provides good bazel integration, if that's your thing.

I'm excited about Jsonnet because now as long as other tool authors decide to consume JSON, I can more easily abstract away their verbosity without writing a purpose-built tool (looking at you, Kubernetes) without resorting to text templating (ahem Helm). Jsonnet might just be my "one JSON-generation language to rule them all"!

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Though if Starlark is your thing, do checkout out skycfg[1]

[0] - https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_jsonnet

[1] - https://github.com/stripe/skycfg

Can you say more about what GCL does better than all of the open source ones?

Anecdotally, I've heard a lot of GCL horror stories, and many Xooglers have chosen to create things like Jsonnet or Skycfg (https://github.com/stripe/skycfg) instead.

If you’re looking at other solutions check out https://github.com/stripe/skycfg It works with Envoy and lots of other things that support protobuf configs

This is good and there are several other options like https://github.com/stripe/skycfg#why-use-skycfg to add full language support (using Go or python for ex) to configurations.