Top all-time · #3449
Lee Briggs
Personal blog · leebriggs.co.uk/blogprogrammingsystems
Lee Briggs writes lbr., a personal blog at leebriggs.co.uk about programming and systems. Since 2017, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “DevOps is a failure”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Lee Briggs' posts on Kubernetes networking, such as how Calico works, and on why templating YAML for configuration is a poor approach. Comments cite them as examples or sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Engineering, DevOps & Cloud Computing
Most-linked posts?
- DevOps is a failure4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-06-21
- Deploying Kubernetes clusters in increasingly absurd languages4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-04
- Why are we templating YAML? (2019)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-23
- The 300% Problem2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-01
- Authenticating to AWS the Right Way2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-09-05
- Things you've heard about Pulumi that aren't true2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-07
- Why does nobody seem to know what imperative and declarative mean?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-21
- Why are we templating YAML?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-07
- The Death of Developer Relations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-10
What Hacker News says?
https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2019/02/07/why-are-we-templatin... Something like Jsonnet would serve one better, I think. The only part that kinda sucks is the "package management" but that's a small price to pay to avoid the YAML insanity. Helm is fine for consuming third-party packages.
Comment linking /blog/2019/02/07/why-are-we-templating-yaml
on “Reclaim the Stack”Submitted Why are we templating YAML? (2019) as a story · 433 points
HN discussionThere's a linked article discussing the shortcomings of YAML, as well: https://arp242.net/weblog/yaml_probably_not_so_great_after_a... Reading the two screeds together, though, I think the author has ignored one key idea of both JSON and YAML as formats: their use-cases are complementary, and the "problems" with each of these two formats only arises when you're using one for the use-case best suited to the other. YA…
Comment linking /blog/2019/02/07/why-are-we-templating-yaml.html
on “JSON as configuration files: please don’t (2016)”Submitted DevOps is a failure as a story · 291 points
HN discussionOP here. I actually wrote a post about Pulumi in this very space a while back https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2018/09/20/using-pulumi-for-k8s... I do think this is more like what we should be doing, but as dismayed to see Pulumi’s free tier get sunsetted
Comment linking /blog/2018/09/20/using-pulumi-for-k8s-config-mgmt.html
on “Why are we templating YAML?”Submitted Why are we templating YAML? as a story · 263 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post about this that did the rounds last year about the topic I believe Copilot is trying to solve: https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2019/04/13/the-fargate-illusion... Summary: the marketing spiel about how easy fargate is to use and get up and running isn't actually how the experience is. I'm hoping Copilot improves that experience.
Comment linking /blog/2019/04/13/the-fargate-illusion.html
on “AWS Copilot”Submitted Deploying Kubernetes clusters in increasingly absurd languages as a story · 149 points
HN discussionThis is more or less what Calico does: https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.1/introduction/ http://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2017/02/18/kubernetes-networking... In a Calico setup, every container (or VM - they use the term "workload" to abstract over the two) has an IP address, and talks to other containers in the usual way. AIUI, Calico does a couple of things to make that work at Cloud Scale (tm): it pushes firewall rules…
Comment linking /blog/2017/02/18/kubernetes-networking-calico.html
on “Cilium 1.0: Bringing the BPF Revolution to Kubernetes Networking and Security”Submitted How I learned to stop worrying and love the YAML as a story · 114 points
HN discussionPeople keep hacking up YAML with templating to produce a configuration language which is a bad solution (see for example https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2019/02/07/why-are-we-templatin... ). The problem is that the people who are using templated YAML don't really want to learn a full-blown language since the vast majority of them never, ever want to write a compiler or a highly concurrent HTTP server. They definitely d…
Comment linking /blog/2019/02/07/why-are-we-templating-yaml
on “A reasonable configuration language”Submitted The Fargate Illusion as a story · 109 points
HN discussionPulumi isn't "built on terraform", that's a common misconception. See here: https://www.leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2021/11/06/pulumi-faqs.html
Comment linking /blog/2021/11/06/pulumi-faqs.html
on “Release of AWS CDKv2 and Construct Hub”Submitted Why does nobody seem to know what imperative and declarative mean? as a story · 57 points
HN discussionPulumi has a few languages other than YAML and Pulumi is declarative[1], and the programs you write are only as complex as you want them to be. This python program declares an S3 bucket and declares ten objects to exist in it. from pulumi_aws import s3 bucket = s3.Bucket('bucket') for i in range(10): s3.BucketObject( f'object- {i}', s3.BucketObjectArgs( bucket=bucket.id, key=str(i), ) ) Even so, Pulumi YAML has a "c…
Comment linking /blog/2022/05/04/deploying-kubernetes-clusters-in-absurd-languages
on “The OpenTF Manifesto”Submitted Why the hell is your Kubernetes API public? as a story · 54 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why does nobody seem to know what imperative and declarative actually mean? as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSubmitted DevOps Is a Failure as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deploying Kubernetes clusters in increasingly absurd languages as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted How I learned to stop worrying and love the YAML as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Free Kubernetes Loadbalancer with Tailscale as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted DevOps Is a Failure – Lbr as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted DevOps Is a Failure as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Death of Developer Relations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The 300% Problem as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Choosing an Infrastructure as Code Solution as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stop using static cloud credentials in GitHub Actions as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Things you've heard about Pulumi that aren't true as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Learn to Code with Infrastructure as Code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Fargate Illusion as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
