The problem with spreadsheets vs regular tables is that spreadsheets allow for a lot of customisation (which is kind of the point of a spreadsheet vs a table).
As a programming interface, that makes spreadsheets deceptively powerful. But as a UI were you need to have control over how the user interacts, that makes spreadsheets incredibly painful to integrate.
Source: myself. I worked on a project around 20 years ago which integrated a spreadsheet into its UI and the number of ways people would break the application each month was mind boggling.
Love it.
I generally avoided excel when my previous role was a dev.
Now, leading a team - I find it more useful as it's a little universe to add various computations (counts, min, max) of various sorts of data that I want to keep track across projects & create charts etc, create rapid UIs (project timelines etc) and easily change them when required, invite collaborators, use that to replace slides to drive meeting discussions
It's quite versatile.
I had never considered this angle of using it to manage and sync with something external like Kubernetes here and love it.
I wish someone also solved the issue with excel around refactoring though - esp when cells are being used in formulas, if there was a "Find All References" or Cmd+SHIFT+F (global find) of elements used in formula (not their values) - it would step it up even more towards maintainability.
(I understand it buckles under huge datasets, but I believe that's really over-use of the tool)
In fact as a configuration file, spreadsheets are a much superior UI, you can change lots of numbers very quickly if your config is tabular in nature. Whether it is a good idea that what you type should modify a prod environment live is a different question. Working in finance and living in spreadsheet it sounds like a terrible design to me. You want to be to inspect the whole config change before it affects the target system.
Just need Factorio integration. Given output from k describe pods -A, generate a blueprint with ingress represented by a belt balancer/splitter bit that feeds into furnaces leading to assemblers leading into boxes representing storage or something.
I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes, but I dig the notion of using a spreadsheet as a control interface. Does anyone know of a similar paradigm for other sysadmin applications?
> I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes
I reckon majority of operations do not strictly need distributed nature of Kubernetes and for many SMBs, which comfortably fit into one or two rack units plus maybe a storage shelf, that's even counterproductive.
However, Kubernetes, being resource virtualization platform, offers some very nice isolation and admin access control capabilities. I guess that's the power of kubernetes for most orgs.
I dunno, I tried making an example pod definition in a spreadsheet just to see what it looks like. It isn't better or more readable as everything is indented too much.
If it was read-only I wouldn't hate it so much. A table view of all my resources wouldn't be bad. But heaven forbidden if I hit a random number in a random cell!
I know several pointy haired bosses in real enterprise IT shops who would jump on this. Because everything is run on Excel/Google spreadsheets.
Better than yaml.
Spreadsheets are underused as an UI. Every time you embed a table component in your app you probably wouldn’t complain about it being one.
The problem with spreadsheets vs regular tables is that spreadsheets allow for a lot of customisation (which is kind of the point of a spreadsheet vs a table).
As a programming interface, that makes spreadsheets deceptively powerful. But as a UI were you need to have control over how the user interacts, that makes spreadsheets incredibly painful to integrate.
Source: myself. I worked on a project around 20 years ago which integrated a spreadsheet into its UI and the number of ways people would break the application each month was mind boggling.
the bar is in hell
Love it. I generally avoided excel when my previous role was a dev. Now, leading a team - I find it more useful as it's a little universe to add various computations (counts, min, max) of various sorts of data that I want to keep track across projects & create charts etc, create rapid UIs (project timelines etc) and easily change them when required, invite collaborators, use that to replace slides to drive meeting discussions
It's quite versatile. I had never considered this angle of using it to manage and sync with something external like Kubernetes here and love it.
I wish someone also solved the issue with excel around refactoring though - esp when cells are being used in formulas, if there was a "Find All References" or Cmd+SHIFT+F (global find) of elements used in formula (not their values) - it would step it up even more towards maintainability.
(I understand it buckles under huge datasets, but I believe that's really over-use of the tool)
Is this feature what you're looking for?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...
Amazing. I used to run a startup that allowed you to write Python scripts that streamed data into Excel in real time - for eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8ddmui/rea...
The python scripts were deployed PaaS style into a Kubernetes cluster.
If only we'd had the insight to manage our control plane via Excel also, we'd probably be squillionaires by now. :P
I love the company's mission statement:
"Replacing YAML with spreadsheets has always been our mission as a company, and we will continue to do so."
They’re not worse than YAML…
In fact as a configuration file, spreadsheets are a much superior UI, you can change lots of numbers very quickly if your config is tabular in nature. Whether it is a good idea that what you type should modify a prod environment live is a different question. Working in finance and living in spreadsheet it sounds like a terrible design to me. You want to be to inspect the whole config change before it affects the target system.
Love it.
For a different sort of person, but there's some rather old efforts to expose Kubernetes & Etcd under FUSE , which would also be neat direct access. https://github.com/opencredo/KubeFuse https://github.com/cstavr/etcdfs
And since I was curious, there's also a spreadsheet to FUSE too, https://github.com/mk270/xls-fuse
As far as I know, the only 3d representation of Kubernetes is KubeDoom, https://github.com/storax/kubedoom
There was https://eric-jadi.medium.com/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-c... too.
Just need Factorio integration. Given output from k describe pods -A, generate a blueprint with ingress represented by a belt balancer/splitter bit that feeds into furnaces leading to assemblers leading into boxes representing storage or something.
The project is super active with lots of contributors as well. This thing is going take over!
(joking in case people didn't look - 2 commits 5 years ago)
This is useful and necessary software. Keep going. This can be a wonderful demystifyer for some and a useful tool for others.
I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes, but I dig the notion of using a spreadsheet as a control interface. Does anyone know of a similar paradigm for other sysadmin applications?
> I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes
I reckon majority of operations do not strictly need distributed nature of Kubernetes and for many SMBs, which comfortably fit into one or two rack units plus maybe a storage shelf, that's even counterproductive.
However, Kubernetes, being resource virtualization platform, offers some very nice isolation and admin access control capabilities. I guess that's the power of kubernetes for most orgs.
https://github.com/storax/kubedoom
Obligatory Doom mention
k3s with the default SQLite based storage instead of ETCD works very well for single node kubernetes instances.
Infrastructure as Excel for Cloud Services:)
> xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes
Great trolling in the name as well
Other possible names:
kubexls
kubecalc
tabelnetes
kube123
I dunno, I tried making an example pod definition in a spreadsheet just to see what it looks like. It isn't better or more readable as everything is indented too much.
I don't care if this works or not it makes me giddy with glee at the idea. Thanks for making my day.
I'd be a great April 1st joke to replace ArgoCD by this spreadsheet
If it was read-only I wouldn't hate it so much. A table view of all my resources wouldn't be bad. But heaven forbidden if I hit a random number in a random cell!
Would love to mix this up with FluxCD
Goodbye GitOps. Hello AccountingOps
It’s called xls, but it uses Google sheets?
The README and faq are really funny. "What??" as the first question is gold
This made my day!
Amazing software, a must have. They never merged my PR though.
Taken the complex and making it so simple, fantastic.
Now let’s map helm config files to csv and use pivot tables for networking
Now it just needs a kubectl plugin to launch Google sheets webpage with carbonyl for e2e terminal use
Now quants can do devops
Does it mean you can give it Finance and get rid of the IT Operations team?
Yes and give a well deserved bonus to those finance guys.