[HN Gopher] xlskubectl - a spreadsheet to control your Kubernete...
___________________________________________________________________
xlskubectl - a spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster
Author : pabs3
Score : 245 points
Date : 2025-03-13 01:12 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| adra wrote:
| I don't care if this works or not it makes me giddy with glee at
| the idea. Thanks for making my day.
| a012 wrote:
| I'd be a great April 1st joke to replace ArgoCD by this
| spreadsheet
| BirAdam wrote:
| Taken the complex and making it so simple, fantastic.
| awsanswers wrote:
| This is useful and necessary software. Keep going. This can be a
| wonderful demystifyer for some and a useful tool for others.
| jaimehrubiks wrote:
| Amazing software, a must have. They never merged my PR though.
| casper14 wrote:
| The README and faq are really funny. "What??" as the first
| question is gold
| test6554 wrote:
| Now let's map helm config files to csv and use pivot tables for
| networking
| Gee101 wrote:
| Does it mean you can give it Finance and get rid of the IT
| Operations team?
| bionsystem wrote:
| Yes and give a well deserved bonus to those finance guys.
| dstanko wrote:
| This would be awesome - let's make finance responsible for
| infrastructure! That way they can at the same time save a lot
| of money, and be accountable (pun intended) for the impact they
| make by "saving" money.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Love it.
|
| 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
| Operyl wrote:
| There was https://eric-jadi.medium.com/minecraft-as-
| a-k8s-admin-tool-c... too.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I love the company's mission statement:
|
| "Replacing YAML with spreadsheets has always been our mission as
| a company, and we will continue to do so."
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| They're not _worse_ than YAML...
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Agree. I don't many use cases for manually editing the
| numbers of various things.
| progbits wrote:
| Also in spreadsheet you can do proper computation,
| reference other values, make VLOOKUPs. So much better than
| YAML where the entire ecosystem seems to pretend there
| isn't a need for abstraction in configs.
| osigurdson wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The project is super active with lots of contributors as well.
| This thing is going take over!
|
| (joking in case people didn't look - 2 commits 5 years ago)
| hdjrudni wrote:
| 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!
| freedomben wrote:
| I would hope it's smart enough to automatically convert any
| values in the cell to a number. For example if I type "a" into
| the cell, it should create 97 replicas
| nativeit wrote:
| 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?
| raffkede wrote:
| Infrastructure as Excel for Cloud Services:)
| ccakes wrote:
| https://github.com/storax/kubedoom
|
| Obligatory Doom mention
| speedgoose wrote:
| k3s with the default SQLite based storage instead of ETCD works
| very well for single node kubernetes instances.
| friendzis wrote:
| > 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.
| moondev wrote:
| Now it just needs a kubectl plugin to launch Google sheets
| webpage with carbonyl for e2e terminal use
| baq wrote:
| Better than yaml.
|
| 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.
| nicman23 wrote:
| the bar is in hell
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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).
| bee_rider wrote:
| If I were an accountant, I would be afraid of a lot of
| technology. In particular, if somebody offered me a Python
| code, and I didn't know Python, I'd be quite worried about
| the handling of rounding and that sort of stuff, by some
| random programmer.
|
| Excel was also written by some random programmer. But the
| code that does anything complicated was at least used by
| everybody in my field, so if there's a hidden bug in there,
| at least the responsibility is diffuse. And the code
| written by me or by someone at my office... well, you can
| at least see what every cell does.
| grvdrm wrote:
| You speak to me as an insurance guy that also writes code
| to get things done. Excel is everywhere. So - everyone
| has the same lens/bug. Also, rounding/numbers in SQL
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder... there are all sorts of cloud offerings for office
| suites nowadays. Google, Microsoft.
|
| If you have a shared spreadsheet in one of these systems,
| surely there must be some way to lock down some rows and
| columns, right? Then, the spreadsheet simply becomes a
| program where intermediary values are displayed and can be
| read. It seems really convenient.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| There are ways. But there's also countless ways you can
| mess with the contents. Plus the problem that spreadsheet
| "administrators" need to unlock to make their changes and
| remember to re-enable those locks when they're done.
|
| At some point, something invariably gets missed and someone
| else finds a way to tamper with it.
|
| Bear in mind that the "tamperers" are never doing so
| maliciously. They're just trying to do their job too. But
| when you have a UI that allows for unlimited abstractions,
| those "tamperers" will dream up a new way to represent
| their needs without realising that they're breaking someone
| else's workflow.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| There are a bunch of options for blocking cells from being
| edited etc.
|
| Excel pros (I am none) can do quite some nice tools on top of
| Excel.
|
| Excel runs the world ...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > There are a bunch of options for blocking cells from
| being edited etc.
|
| I've already addressed this and the problems with that
| approach.
|
| > Excel pros (I am none) can do quite some nice tools on
| top of Excel.
|
| As I explained in my OP, I was one of them.
|
| > Excel runs the world ...
|
| I agree. I never claimed otherwise. So I don't really
| understand your point here if it's not to make a strawman
| argument.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I'm developing an app right now which uses a spreadsheet as its
| principal UI. It will be a painful process to gradually wean
| the users off of that.
| davedx wrote:
| Anything is better than cursed yaml
| dhab wrote:
| 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)
| anner_ wrote:
| Is this feature what you're looking for?
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...
| philips wrote:
| Today I learned.
|
| Here is the doc for Google sheets: https://support.google.com
| /docs/answer/63175?hl=en&co=GENIE....
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > 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 usually handle this in MS Excel by searching "in workbook"
| and "in formulas". Works even better when the elements are in a
| named cell which is referenced in formulas (i.e.
| "stat.infra.APIrequests" instead of "$A$5"), this way you can
| also globally change the element by reassigning the cell-name
| to another cell
| mns06 wrote:
| Amazing. I used to run a startup that allowed you to write Python
| scripts that streamed data into Excel in real time - for eg.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8ddmui/rea...
|
| 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
| fulafel wrote:
| > xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes
|
| Great trolling in the name as well
| ithkuil wrote:
| Other possible names:
|
| kubexls
|
| kubecalc
|
| tabelnetes
|
| kube123
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's called xls, but it uses Google sheets?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Someone needs to go build gsheetkubectl, for Microsoft Excel.
| benterix wrote:
| This made my day!
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Would love to mix this up with FluxCD
| _joel wrote:
| Goodbye GitOps. Hello AccountingOps
| formerly_proven wrote:
| There is already FinOps...
| eichin wrote:
| The "inspired by" link is to a reddit thread that uses
| (coins?) the term "SheetOps"...
| nextts wrote:
| Now quants can do devops
| stuff4ben wrote:
| I know several pointy haired bosses in real enterprise IT shops
| who would jump on this. Because everything is run on Excel/Google
| spreadsheets.
| danielepolencic wrote:
| 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.
| javcasas wrote:
| A Jira version. Children look under the bed afraid of finding
| monsters. Monsters look under the bed afraid of finding you.
| a012 wrote:
| Fantastic, now my PM can just go ahead create a ticket to scale
| the workloads without having me to update the spreadsheet again
| organsnyder wrote:
| How about a Workday version? Maybe also one integrated with an
| Epic EMR somehow?
| freedomben wrote:
| Ooh yes! Also would love a Salesforce integration so the
| sales team can scale up without talking to eng. Bonus points
| if they can add and remove nodes
| Tade0 wrote:
| Please do. My manager is going to love this.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| This is a cursed project, but I can't help but admire it.
| baq wrote:
| Yaml is more cursed. This is great.
| freedomben wrote:
| when you get a chance, please add Office 97 compatibility and
| release an Electron-based native app. Also the page doesn't
| load properly on IE6. Thanks!
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe someone could make xlsiptables.
| arkh wrote:
| I'm disappointed it does not run in excel but uses a google
| spreadsheet.
| crest wrote:
| This has to be the perfect passive aggressive comeback to
| bitchslap a project manager with a mirco-management fetish into
| the PaaS cost control limits the moment they demonstrate the
| power at their fingertips by adding a few zeroes. You have setup
| those limits didn't you, project manager?
| ConanRus wrote:
| sick bastard
| brainzap wrote:
| I actually export a spreadsheet to review the memory limits.
| matttproud wrote:
| Talk about taking declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to a
| whole new absurd level.
|
| (Or more like putting the manager back in the management plane.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-13 23:01 UTC)