Kapp Alternatives

kapp reviews and mentions

• 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:

• Is there any CLI tool to sync between local yamls and current cluster namespace state?
  1 project | /r/kubernetes | 19 Jul 2021

  Take a look at kapp (https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kapp).

• 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

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