cloak VS jsii

SEEKING FOUNDER CEO | Dev Tools | CEO Co-founder | Worldwide | MVP

Lookign for

Someone with experience taking a product to market, someone willing to trade equity for MAUs.

Idea

https://cloak.software/

Current Progress

Ready to onboard users but still a few issues to iron out.

Contact

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianpurton

Hi. I'm also working on an E2E secrets manager. https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

A few tips.

1. It looks like I'm able to do account enumeration on your login page. For a secure app you want to make sure this is not possible.

You want to take a look at Earthly. https://earthly.dev/

This gives you a mix of docker and a makefile.

The best bit is you can test your pipeline locally and you are vendor agnostic.

I'm using it here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

I commit to a github repo and that gets deployed to cloudflare pages. https://pages.cloudflare.com/

I use Zola the static site generator. My repo is here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/tree/main/www

You can see my migrations to switch on RLS here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/blob/main/db/migrations/20220808094314_tenancy_isolation.sql

Hi we are running selenium tests in our CI/CD pipeline.

We do actually generate a video of the tests running as an example see here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/actions/runs/2787628672

We're not using cypress we use webdriver connected to a selenium docker instance.

Is that something you can connect to?

I can give you a concrete example if that helps.

I looked at the "secrets automation" space and my background is cryptography and web development.

I'm a solo developer so when I look at a problem I have to make the solution small enough that I can actually build it.

I also have to have an idea about how I will get people to use my product i.e. marketing.

In my case 1Password raised 620million in funding based on their acquisition of Secretshub which for me proves there is a market in secrets automation for developers.

I looked at the secretshub product and I was confident I could build it better with easier to use encryption and make it open source.

As the market is developers I feel writing blog articles about software development will give me a route to market.

So I started about 4 months ago. The product is now here https://cloak.software and source code is here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

My first article about web development with rust has already had 16K views so I'm confident with the marketing approach. Now the hard works starts of turning visitors into paying users.

Hope this helps.

I've just launched an MVP for a solution to this problem. https://cloak.software/

I've been using Earthly for about 6 months.

Earthly uses Dockerfile style syntax so I don't have to learn a new language, I can leverage my existing knowledge.

Another advantage is that in Earthly I can run up a docker compose within my pipeline so that I have selenium, envoy and postgres running for integration testing.

You can see my integration tests here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/blob/main/Earthfile#L14...

Is that possible in dagger?

What about jsii? The technology behind AWS sdks: https://aws.github.io/jsii/

Is Stainless similar, different?

The libraries for other supported languages of CDK are built as wrappers for underlying JS or maybe TS code via https://github.com/aws/jsii

So all the core CDK code is written first in JS/TS and then stubs for the other languages are added

Unfortunately this is often done without consideration for how the other supported langs actually work, and artefacts of e.g. JS lack of support for kwargs leak through

This is why e.g. the typing in CDK Python is completely broken - pretty much uniformly the concrete types like "Resource" don't implement their corresponding interface like "IResource" (to a type checker)

(There are many other typing niggles like this but that's the most egregious and pervasive one)

At the end of the day, having to explicitly cast concrete types as their interface to satisfy type checker is a minor annoyance, albeit a stupid one that could have been avoided with more care in the core library.

I could live with that, but I encountered so many bugs and issues trying to use CDK on current project that it's now much clearer to me why every company I worked at previously was using Terraform.

Pretty sure some of those issues are ultimately CloudFormation ones. The cumbersome CF > CDK JS > CDK Python stack is great for obfuscating errors and making debugging hard or impossible though.

Pulumi do something similar, albeit with Go as the core language and Terraform underneath. From what I've seen with a little use they have a much more successful result though, Pulumi Python was not a complete mess, and deploys faster and more reliable with better error feedback. I guess they just took more care to get it right.

Every version of the CDK uses an interop layer and runs on top of the Typescript version

https://github.com/aws/jsii

And as far as TF supports services before CFT. Guess which is easier for an AWS employee to do - getting the CF service team to support a new service or just contribute to Terraform’s open source project?

I know of at least one service where the service team introduced the needed APIs and then an employee of AWS wrote the TF provider and contributed to the project before AWS’s own internal team added it to CFT.

Source: former AWS ProServe employee

To "meet developers where they are" is a beautiful tenet of AWS, and of the CDK, and inspired us to create awesome technology such as JSII and constructs.

Yeah both CDKTF and Pulumi piggyback on JSII, a class translator that supports the languages you've mentioned, which was used as a building base for CDK.

The reason we chose to start with compilation to JavaScript and not some other popular cloud language is because JavaScript is currently one of the most used ones, and in addition, we are using JSII to write our SDK in Typescript and then export it for consumption in other languages, such as Go, Python, Java and others.

The CDKTF CLI is implemented in TypeScript. Providers and resources are implemented in TypeScript as well. jsii is used to compile the providers and resources to the supported languages.