MHmh0pe·Aug 15, 2021
My stance is that YAML is a good format for configuration management and generation -- it's wonderful at filling gaps as your deployment model increases in complexity to provide a mechanism to "render" your configuration -- much like Skylark [1] does (derived from Google's internal GCL).
YAML ends up being a powerfully declarative model [2] for the state of a data structure, rather than a straight representation, ironically often enough being used in turn for an imperative model like in Ansible [3]. Definitely friendlier than JSON. But personally, I really like YAML because it lets me compose using a traits/mixins-like model using & and *, which allows for verbose, structured configuration inputs but concise configuration files.
docker-compose YAML files extension fields [4], imo, are a great example of this type of model in action. Wh
Read the rest
en you leave this much pre-deserialization flexibility in your configuration representation, it makes building cool stuff like docker-compose ECS support x-aws-* extension keys [5] and other plugin system-type capabilities much more straightforward than, for example, adding a new language feature to HCL.
[1]: https://github.com/google/skylark
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML#Advanced_components
[3]: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks...
[4]: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3...
[5]: https://docs.docker.com/cloud/ecs-integration/#rolling-updat...