Comment by sprior | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sprior | Hacker News Reader

I just saw this and created a quick deployment to my k3s installation. I created deployment.yaml, service.yaml, and ingress.yaml. I've got a few things already set up like wildcard DNS, cert-manager, and homepage so I've got a few extras in these files and kubeforge is already showing up in my homepage and deployed with https.

I ran into errors when I tried to download the schema, but then it suddenly started working, not sure why.

My first impression is that even with a high resolution laptop screen you're going to end up doing a lot of zooming in and out even for trivial deployments.

I imported the directory where I created those 3 yaml files and now have 3 connected boxes for the ingress, two for the deployment, and three for the service, but no interconnections between those three groups. It would be nice if the labels were cross connected between those groups, even better if when you were creating those groups from scratch you could specify the labels on one side then draw the edge connecting them and the label would get filled in on the other side and even get updated when one side changes. For example if I created a deployment with app.kubernetes.io/name of kubeforge and then was able to create the service object and link the edge and have that label connect.

There is a lot to unpack here! Thank you for the feedback!

1. For the errors on downloading the schema, that is something that I need to bake through and improve. (https://github.com/kubenote/KubeForge/issues/5)

2. To minimalize scrolling around for deployments I want to incorporate a "minimize" feature on nodes so that users can free up space on the graph. (https://github.com/kubenote/KubeForge/issues/6)

3. Interconnectivity is built in but currently only with inline data on nodes. Adding the capability to object refs does make sense. In the future I also want to create generic "string nodes" as a first pass at templating via the node graph. (https://github.com/kubenote/KubeForge/issues/7)

Thank you for kicking the tires and giving me feedback on how to improve! Did you find the concept refreshing? And what would you like to see in it for it to be something that you would actively use?

After playing with it a bit more it looks nice but has fallen into an uncanny valley of usefulness. It provides a nice looking way to view the structure and a very syntax assisted way to change that structure, but no guidance whatsoever as to what you probably need to do. For example for me to deploy kubeforge I picked a set of 3 yaml files from something else and copied them to a new directory and then it was basically a search and replace to change the names and image file. So I had to really understand the files once and now I'm doing fairly mindless work to reuse them. But with kubeforge I have to deeply understand the details every time and select them from pulldowns - that's actually harder. I know I could have imported those yaml files first, made changes and exported them, but then I'd be going to the fields and changing them one by one, there is no equivalent of global search and replace. Now if I need to do something new/different then kubeforge can make it easier to figure out what options are at any given spot but still provides no guidance - I recently used initContainers for the first time in a project and could have used a "oh you want to set up an initContainer, here are the required elements for that".

Would love to take a deeper dive into what you feel would improve your experience.

I'd be happy to discuss, we'd need to figure out a better communication path but that's doable.

Some quick wins: - make the workspace persistent so you can resume what you were doing the last time you visited - the Swagger UI does this, not sure how but I suspect browser side storage. This might be easy for you. - more user feedback when you add a new block to the workspace. For example I kept clicking items from the toolbar wondering why nothing was happening until I finally realized a buttload of new objects had appeared in the workspace but weren't highlighted enough to notice them.

Some kind of auto-arrange would help a lot, starting with a pile of rectangles that you have to manually drag around to have any chance of making sense of it isn't ideal.

Graph diagrams look great but they fill a screen VERY quickly. There has to be a lot of thought into how to make the boxes as small as possible so someone can get the overall layout of the land, but can quickly access any details.

And the harder stuff would be some kind of assist dialog when you add a new toolbar item (I'm NOT going to suggest AI here, maybe just a dialog box which lists mandatory items and them other items in the order from most to least common). I understand this is tricky because you intend to support all API versions.

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