I really want to dive in with Cue, but one thing that I got burned on when using jsonnet to generate CloudFormation templates years ago was lack of discoverability for newcomers to the repo.
Taking your sample code as an example, someone might look at the myapp deployment definition and ask: “does this deployment get created in the default namespace or does it automatically create a myapp namespace? What’s the default number of replicas? Are there any labels or annotations that get automatically added?” Etc.
On the flip side, there’s potential lack of “greppability.” The user may have found a problem with a deployed resource in, say, the development cluster, and go to grep for some resource-specific string in the repo, only to come up empty because that string is not in the source but rather generated at by the templating system.
To be clear, both of these problems can affect any method of generating config, be it yoke, helm, ksonnet, kustomize, or cue. It’s like a curse of abstraction. The more you make things into nice reusable components, the easier it is for you to build upon, and the harder it is for others to others to jump in and modify.
At least with Cue you get properly typed values and parameter validation built in, which puts it miles ahead of “everything is a string” templating systems like the helm templates the article complains about.
Taking your sample code as an example, someone might look at the myapp deployment definition and ask: “does this deployment get created in the default namespace or does it automatically create a myapp namespace? What’s the default number of replicas? Are there any labels or annotations that get automatically added?” Etc.
On the flip side, there’s potential lack of “greppability.” The user may have found a problem with a deployed resource in, say, the development cluster, and go to grep for some resource-specific string in the repo, only to come up empty because that string is not in the source but rather generated at by the templating system.
To be clear, both of these problems can affect any method of generating config, be it yoke, helm, ksonnet, kustomize, or cue. It’s like a curse of abstraction. The more you make things into nice reusable components, the easier it is for you to build upon, and the harder it is for others to others to jump in and modify.
At least with Cue you get properly typed values and parameter validation built in, which puts it miles ahead of “everything is a string” templating systems like the helm templates the article complains about.