opentelemetry-helm-charts VS hcl

Refer to the official documentation for the Helm chart for comprehensive instructions and configuration options: OpenTelemetry Helm Charts Documentation.

In my latest Nomadification Project (TM), I got the OpenTelemetry Demo App to run on Nomad (with HashiQube, of course). To do this, I used the OpenTelemetry Demo App Helm Chart as my guide. In doing this, and other Nomadifications, I realized that I’ve never gone through the process of explaining the conversion process from Kubernetes manifests to Nomad jobspecs.

Y’all...I’m so excited, because I finally got to work on an item on my tech bucket list. Last week, I began the process of translating OpenTelemetry (OTel) Demo App’s Helm Charts to HashiCorp Nomad job specs.

After creating a Kubernetes cluster, we needed to create a Kubernetes resource before we could apply the Helm chart to install the OpenTelemetry demo app. The Demo App’s Helm Chart deploys an OpenTelemetry Collector. We wanted to configure the Collector to send OTel data to Lightstep. To do so, you need to add a Lightstep Access Token, which is stored as a Kubernetes secret.

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Demo App using the OpenTelemetry Demo Helm Chart

Now let's dive right in and figure out how to use the Helm chart provided by OpenTelemetry.

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.

Not related to C but HCL exists.