VMware Octant Community Meetings, 2 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Octant Community Meeting - September 02, 2020

Description

September 2, 2020
Agenda
- From `kubectl api-resources`, what is missing? Currently requested but not implemented (pod security policy, storage class - https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/octant/issues/381.
- Will add as requested by community
- Octant plugin for Knative - https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/octant-plugin-for-knative
- Requires Octant HEAD / 0.16+
- Upcoming release
- Blocker: Loading indicator
- Blocker: Component flicker
- What to expect?
- Faster.
- Expanded Plugin API w/ events (alerts, redirects).
- New components. (stepper, modal)
- Not Found page.
- Thank yous
- https://github.com/scothis
- https://github.com/ipsi
- https://github.com/nanaasiedu

A

Okay, welcome everybody to the september 2nd 2020. There's a typo there um september I'll, read anything on the prompter um september, 2nd octant community meeting. uh Today we're going to talk a bit about what's kind of missing from our list of built-in api resources that we show views for.

A

Scott andrews uh has done a lot of work on an octant uh plugin for k native uh we're going to show a quick demo of which is written in the new javascript plugin api. We're going to talk about the upcoming release and we're going to just say some thank yous to uh scott and and nana and andrew who were uh recently working on octant, but we'll be off doing some other things. Hopefully, they'll still be around a little bit, but probably not as much so with that. um I will.

A

I think, sam you put this one in here. If you want to, if you want to take it.

B

Yes, so this one came in from a slack request last week and someone asked uh if why don't we have pod security policies and I think, there's an outstanding issue for storage class, and so we still have a bunch of api resources that hasn't really been implemented, and my question really is: what's our, how are we prioritizing these?

B

um Are we doing them as they requested, or do we ever have plans to have the complete list uh and make it configurable to maybe uh have users choose what they want to have an opt-in, um but, but I think I I'd at least like to come to some consensus on uh what we'd like to implement in the short term.

B

A

B

I think I don't have any issues with uh adding pod security policy and storage class, as is but was to be missing. A few.

A

Okay, so so we're to pod. So basically, the outcome of this is we're going to add pot security policy in storage class.

A

A

uh Any questions comments there.

B

Yeah, uh do we want to.

C

Add more, I guess what what is our plan for adding more okay, so.

A

What's been working I mean honestly, I will say I think, what's been working pretty well, is someone comes along and says hey? I would like to see that and then we add it. um I I don't know that we want to go through the exercise of arbitrarily just adding everything, because um honestly, some of it isn't like, if we just add all of it, some of it isn't that useful and then now we're like.

A

Where do we put all of it and we're already kind of in a situation where we might need to rethink and redesign our nav and um like how our menus fly out and how things stack before we go and just add everything.

D

A

Arbitrarily adding.

D

Everything is kind of how custom resources work today.

D

Yeah for better or worse.

B

All right, so I'm gonna, put on the note here will add, as requested by community.

E

Unless there's, you know very special need that we think we're satisfied with adding it. I would really wait for community to push us and that.

A

Yeah and and storage class was asked for in an issue, and then pod security policy was just asked for on uh slack, so I think both of those qualify as like for me, if, like one person asked for it, I'm like all right. This is good.

A

Enough cool uh so moving on to the octant plugin for k native uh scott, did you want to do a demo or just uh talk about the repo or.

D

Yeah, I can do a quick demo.

D

Make sure I got the right window, okay, uh so I'm losing track of time, but I think it was last week maybe earlier this week I got approval to open source a new repo.

D

So this is an auction plugin for canadian, as wayne mentioned, this is using the new javascript api and they've really been kind of using this, as a proof point to kind of like exercise that api and sort of iron out some other rough spots.

D

um There certainly are still some rough spots in that api um and to actually run this, it will definitely require building octane from source right now until we get 0-16 out the door um because it would definitely require some changes that will uh break often prior to that, um so to actually get going with it.

D

Basically, just uh check clone the repo install the npm dependencies and just run npm run, plug-in, install and that will basically copy or it'll build the javascript plug-in and copy it into the config to uninstall, basically just delete that file and what it looks like when it's running so basically just have a new plugin that gets added to contributed to the nav bar and here, without getting too deep into the details of canada's model.

D

So far, it's focusing on creative serving uh which has services, configurations and routes, so a creative service, basically decomposes into configurations and routes, and then there's a couple other resources internally.

D

So basically, we can see a quick overview of what all these resources are. If we drill into one of these, we can basically see a summary. So this spec is pretty basic. There's a lot more detail that needs to still be fleshed out, but we can see statuses. We can see the urls that have been assigned to it. We can see the latest revisions.

D

Also revisions is one of those nested resources, sort of that it's created internally, and one of the things that canada really can do is that every time you modify the spec it'll, basically just stamp out a new revision and those revisions are intended to be immutable, and then you can route traffic to various revisions.

D

um So you can basically do things like blue green deployments or do canary deployments or just sort of like really sort of advanced surgical routing. So you can do more advanced traffic policies. Don't have the ability to edit this yet, but you can sort of break down the percentage of traffic that you want to send various revisions as well.

D

As you can see, the revisions that are happening here um so within the plugin, basically have all the things you would normally expect, like a metadata view, a yaml editor, so you can go edit things something I've been playing around with this, isn't on uh in the repo yet but playing around with um our resource viewer.

D

uh So because this is using the javascript api, um we don't have a little access to a lot of the uh the api facilities that the go plugins do uh just because it hasn't been built out yet um so, basically, for the research viewer had to actually go physically.

D

Look up all these resources and sort of like construct the view, rather than having a it automatically kind of find owner references and like when you find the deployment knowing it'll know how to like go find a replica set in a pod and like this any secrets that are bound to it or config maps that are bound to it or like the service account so like that sort of has to all be done manually right now, just because it's a different api, uh but that basically gave me the opportunity to kind of like rethink okay.

D

What should a resource viewer be in the canadian world in terms of a control plan? So basically just have a quick visualization of the creative control structure, but then we're also thinking.

D

Okay, so there's the control structure, but then also connative has this notion of being able to route traffic to different configurations and services or sorry different revisions and configurations so within a single kind of service. Typically, it's all sort of self-contained, but there's no reason why you couldn't have a route that referenced a different configuration or a different revision.

D

So the idea of having a separating from the control plane of the resources having sort of a data plane view.

D

So this is a pretty simple use case, because it's just basically one service, that's receiving traffic and forwarding it to a single revision, but sort of just having a different representation of sort of the same fundamental underlying data structure.

D

um There's still a lot. This is like very much work in progress. There's still a lot to flesh out um so, like all the statuses are not accurate. uh All the selected fields are not quite working right, but just sort of an idea that I'm playing with so kind of going a step further within a revision basically have again sort of the spec and status. But in this case, uh a revision is something that individual independently will scale from zero to n replicas, depending on the number of requests coming in.

D

So one of the big things about canada is it's serverless, so by default it'll scale down to zero, um so being able to see all the pods that are actively running in this case there are none, but, as traffic comes in, you would just would scale up and you would see pods as they're starting is also as well as they're terminating. They would show up in this listing.

D

uh Then finally, it's one of the things that's a little interesting is. I haven't seen this pattern in often before, but wanted to have the ability to create a new service.

D

So this is a little bit janky at the moment in terms of just trying to wire in a form so like this is not fantastic, but once you click into it, you can basically then define a name so.

D

Give it a service name and I'll just give it a hello world image.

D

That's exciting there. It goes. um I also have error pages. uh So then it'll basically just go create that new service, and then you can sort of interact with it. How you normally would so just sort of the idea that octan doesn't have to just be a tool to be able to visualize resources, but we can also start to create things.

D

So I think I'll ask the highlights unless there's something else you know you want to see when.

A

No, this is great. um I guess the question I have is so like the the data plane. Tab is really about kind of visualizing, the the service with its traffic policy and its revisions right so like the.

D

A

Yeah, I really like that.

D

So it it it's very much um just trying to visualize the traffic policy listing rather than it just being a table, um and in this case it's it's so simplistic. It's almost like, actually not that interesting uh but like if there was a way to be able to actually like annotate this edge with the percentage of traffic, that's being received or being able to do some sort of visualization. So you can actually see the amount of requests that are going into a given mode or just some sort of like slightly different uh visualization hierarchy.

E

Yeah, that's pretty cool. How are you uh creating this data right now like uh shape data and all that.

D

uh So I don't have this committed at the moment, but I will I'll put up a pr and I'll link you to it. uh So basically just created a couple helper methods to try to create nodes and edges and um using the the resource viewer component to actually represent the bigger component.

D

So that's kind of like one interesting point about the current javascript api is that it's very much declarative structures. There's almost no imperative helpers like that. The go api has a fair number of. um So when you need those things you kind of have to like recreate them yourself right now.

D

um I guess something else. That's kind of interesting to call out just the idea of having lots of sub paths and sort of routing so like the plugin doesn't provide any facility for being able to define routes within a plug-in.

D

So I went to found some um some routing library that actually allows you to do parameterized paths and we'll actually do the mapping for you and sort of like tease out the chunks of the url that are relevant.

A

Oh, that's nice yeah, I was, I had wondered uh because we had a conversation about the routing on that on the issue and I I had wondered if there was going to be like a a pre-existing javascript library that might help do it.

D

Yeah so with the one I ended up using, um which is actually, I believe, it's used inside of the ember router, but they basically abstracted it into a library nice. uh So it.

D

Is route recognizer excellent.

A

And I will say that any time that we add a third-party package to the javascript plugin and it transpiles and works, I'm very pleased so yeah.

D

This is also like a fantastic library because it has no dependencies. Oh that's excellent yeah, and it is intended to be like the core of other libraries that get consumed, so it was like perfect for the use case. um Its api is a little bit squirrely, um so I think we could still do something more to actually like put this into a uh a better. If you guys.

E

It still depends.

D

It's still intended for like views that are decorated, um so you can actually define like routes and then sub routes within that, and so you can kind of like get sort of the window. Chrome, that's decorated, as you have like multiple map chain path segments, um but I just needed, like one tier one level, just to kind of go and map everything in.

A

Yeah, this is I, it might be nice, and this is some this is. This is getting into the weeds a little bit, but I think, especially on the on the plug-in, the javascript plug-in side. It might be really nice to have a combination of uh following more of the like dependency injection pattern, along with a decorator pattern for routes. So then you could decorate any function to say it's a route with this path and then use dependency injection to get the uh dashboard client, the http, client and things like that in there.

D

Yeah, so a lot of the the primitives are definitely in place in terms of just being able to render out components, but defining more of the idioms would definitely be helpful.

A

Yeah cool. uh There was one other thing that I noticed that I wanted to mention: um oh, not related to the plugin, but the not found page. I think it would be uh it'd be nice if we had the ability to signal to the not found page that uh it we're expecting something to be there so that the user gets like like like when we get the loading indicator. Working again, we could manually say like go to this not found page and have the loading indicator functioning or something like that. But anyway,.

D

Yeah so I basically created a clone of the octant not found page, um with a little uh caveat that it links off to the creative dev site instead of wikipedia about options, but just kind of get the same pattern. But I had to wire it in myself: okay, yep.

D

Which certainly works as long as you're not concerned about having like different looking fields for not found.

A

Yeah, this is great. This is excellent.

E

Yeah, pretty cool nice workshop.

A

A

Anyone any other questions or comments for scott on that before I move on.

A

All right, let me share the agenda again, uh so moving on to upcoming release, uh so the demo that you just saw for the octet plug-in for k-native uh will require this new release. So, if you're interested in trying it out, you currently have to download it nightly uh or build it from source, uh the upcoming release will uh well first, let's we have a couple blockers.

A

uh One is we added some speed improvements which you talked about in the last community meeting um and uh 12 the pr 1242, uh those kind of they worked, but they were a bit of a hack and uh the result is that we broke some things and also when we tried to fix the hack we introduced component flicker again and broke that so uh the the the short of it is we there's a blocker on getting loading indicators back in place. It might not be the circle. Spinning indicator that we've used in the past.

A

It may be a bar across the top or or something to indicate that there is progress being made, uh because right now there is no indicator. uh It's currently broken or not being displayed. It's not really broken. Just took it out uh because it didn't fit our existing model and then um there was some component flicker that is blocking.

A

That was reintroduced where things would pop on the screen pop off the screen and pop on the screen and really rapid uh rapid way, uh very, not friendly at all and annoying and uh a source of frustration for anybody who would actually use it. So we're not gonna be releasing until those two things are unblocked actively working on them. There's pr's in flight there's discussions in flight about how we might solve these things, so I don't expect that they will hold us up for for too long.

A

um But those are the current blockers for the odat 16 release, um but on the good side, what to expect for modot 16, uh it's faster, um both visually like it pretends to be faster, but also it actually is faster. We've changed the way, we've loaded some components and we have removed some of the overhead around uh loading uh data grids with data all at once, and so the result is a faster render. But then uh you also get so it's both it's perception as well as real time. uh So that's a great improvement.

A

We've expanded the plugin api to uh include events. So on the go side you can send alerts uh on the javascript side, it's a little more generic, it's an event sending endpoint, and that allows you to do the two events that we currently support, which are alerts and redirects.

A

You saw redirects being used in the uh octant plug-in for k-native demo. Just now where scott created a new service and it redirected to a page. uh We saw the not found page and then once the resource was created, we saw the resource page so um very common use case that that people have been requesting for a while. So you will have that ability now uh and to go along with that. uh There's uh some new components that we've we've uh been working on a stepper component and a modal component, the stepper component.

A

I believe there was a demo of it at one of the previous community meetings, but um I don't think I have anything that can demo it right now, maybe I'll put sam on the spot and see if sam has something that is demorable with a stepper component. At the moment I know he's been working on them, so maybe we can show it, um but if not that's fine and then there's a so the separate components, the clarity stepper. Let me pull it up. uh Let's see.

A

Just demo it that way, uh it's it's also currently in our.

A

uh What do you call it storybook site so, but this is the stepper component. It is. uh It allows you to uh capture form inputs, put validators on there, and then uh you know you. You can go to the next field next field and uh and submit the form right now. The each step uh has to be declared ahead of time and there is no way to do any processing between steps.

A

So you have to kind of already know all of your steps ahead of time and be able to uh put all of the form, information and validation that you want in place. We are currently working on uh how we want to handle dealing with per step validation, which would then inform the next step of its content.

A

That's something that we are actively looking at, but it won't be in this next release and then the modal is something that exists within octane already, but we haven't really. We didn't really expose it through the api. uh It was just we're leveraging it through clarity, so you will be able to define and use your own modals and they can have forms embedded in them.

A

I believe that was the use case that sam was using, um so you know there's that I think can do I don't know what we have for sizing and stuff like that. I'm not sure, but we sam worked on that. So sam can can add some detail around the modal component.

B

A

B

uh I'd, probably, let's see, wouldn't be able to do it. I guess I think my open pr right now has uh is still built in the previous version of angular, so I'm just gonna have to yeah so serving it is gonna, be weird. I think I have to like just remove node modules and rebuild it again. If I wanna demo it so I'm not gonna tap dance for five minutes. While that happens, but um there's I mean there's a screenshot in the uh pr.

B

I think it's like 13.05 uh and it's fairly straightforward, uh you you can have a modal and it kind of just if you're familiar with flex layout, it's kind of similar to that you just throw any component on it. It's got a little bit of business logic in it. So if you just have a plain old component in it, the button will be closed.

B

But if you added a form um it will be submitted, cancel- uh and this raises some interesting questions around like uh if you had a stepper component inside a modal and you submit the and you get to the final step and you submit the information in the modal. It kind of just stays on the model as a success, and it goes away so there might be there's definitely going to be more cases that says to address like what happens when you start filling out a form and you close out and you come back.

B

Does the data stay there or do you expect it to clear? So there's there's a bunch of um interesting cases that we can talk about. So this is really just meant to start a pattern for us to think about what um submitting forms in optimize. Look like.

A

Excellent great.

A

And the not found page which we saw during the demo uh is, is just that the scott created a page that uh will display uh a more friendly error, letting you know that the resource you're trying to get to could not be located. uh It actually has some some some suggestions uh make like it says. Maybe it was deleted. Maybe it's still pending being created. uh Maybe it's never coming back and you should go somewhere else like it's, it's, uh informative uh and and works.

A

So that is something you'll you'll see uh when you're using octet. Now it's a little more friendly than what we had before, which was, uh I believe we just sat you on a spinner and you just sat there looking at nothing. So this is much better um anything. Did I miss anything on the not found scott.

D

The previous behavior is that it would actually redirect you up one level of the url hierarchy.

A

D

A

So it would actually.

D

A

D

Especially if you redirect to a page while being created.

A

Yeah yeah and then uh finally I I mentioned this at the start of the community meeting.

A

I just wanted to say thank you to scott and andrew and nana who were uh working on octan uh recently over the last uh last couple months and made a lot of great contributions to the to the upstream we've um they're they're, going to be doing some other things within vmware, so they won't be working on octant core as much but they'll probably likely still be developing plug-ins and doing some interesting things and causing work for us, which is great. So I I look forward to that.

A

So I just want to say thank you and scott's here now, so thank you, scott and that's it are. Were there any? Let's see going normally we do questions uh open, open questions. Anyone got anything they want to add before we call.

A

A

All right well, thank you. Everyone and I'll see you next.

A