Hey, I'm the person behind this project. Thank you for sharing this. Many people have reached out to improve it, and I might come back with a Jira version one day.
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)
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 great thing about spreadsheets is that most grown ups understand them.
I've used it as the best UI for Accountants, Lawyers and other people that are famous for being afraid of technology. It's a great "bridge between "the system" and the people who want to get something from it.
I’m not disputing spreadsheets as an assessable IDE for “non-programmers”.
I’m a big fan of spreadsheets for “getting shit done”.
But if you’re building a UI for other people to consume, you’ll quickly find that they’d break it in all manner of exotic ways.
This is why CRUD solutions exist. Sometimes you want the relational bookkeeping but with a more restricted UI. In those type of scenarios even MS Access is a better option than Excel (for example).
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!
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)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...
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.
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.
I've used it as the best UI for Accountants, Lawyers and other people that are famous for being afraid of technology. It's a great "bridge between "the system" and the people who want to get something from it.
I’m a big fan of spreadsheets for “getting shit done”.
But if you’re building a UI for other people to consume, you’ll quickly find that they’d break it in all manner of exotic ways.
This is why CRUD solutions exist. Sometimes you want the relational bookkeeping but with a more restricted UI. In those type of scenarios even MS Access is a better option than Excel (for example).
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
"Replacing YAML with spreadsheets has always been our mission as a company, and we will continue to do so."
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
(joking in case people didn't look - 2 commits 5 years ago)
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.
Obligatory Doom mention
Great trolling in the name as well
kubexls
kubecalc
tabelnetes
kube123