Why crystal ?

[gedw99]

I don’t think I want to use this because of using crystal . Why did you chose this approach ? Is it like terraforming in sone way ?

[vitobotta]

Please use discussions instead of issues for things not concerning issues with the tool :)

Originally this was a Ruby project since I am primarily a Ruby developer, but since Ruby is an interpreted language I couldn't easily produce binaries so users had to either set up a Ruby environment and install the gem or use a Docker container in order to use this tool.

Crystal is a compiled language and makes it easy for me to produce simple binaries that can be easily downloaded and are ready to use. I choose Crystal over other languages because it's very similar to Ruby in syntax.

What difference does it make for you, as user, which language the tool is written in? Genuinely curious.

And no, it's not related at all to Terraform and it's much easier and quicker to use than Terraform. Before this tool I was using Terraform myself.

This tool is much simpler to use as it only requires a small YAML configuration file and is very, very fast. It can create a small cluster in just a couple of minutes.

Terraform requires you to write some code in the Terraform DSL, which is more work for you and requires keeping its state somewhere etc. Sure, there are tools based on Terraform that simplify this approach to some extent, but it's still Terraform.

My tool requires literally:

1. Download the binary
2. Customise the simple config file (at a minimum you just need to choose a name for your cluster and configure node pools with a name for each, the instance type and either the number of nodes or autoscaling enabled; that's it. The remaining configuration options are not required and you can leave them set to their defaults if you don't have particular needs).
3. Run the create command.

That's it. Within a few minutes you have the cluster created and ready for use and you can provision persistent volumes and load balancers out of the box without needing to installing or configure anything else.

I believe this tool is the fastest and easiest way to create and manage Kubernetes clusters in Hetzner Cloud.

[gedw99]

thanks as i did not know about crystal. always good to look at new stuff.

[vitobotta]

It's a pretty good language with awesome syntax and very fast, comparable to Rust in speed. I wish it was more popular but hopefully its popularity will grow over time.