xlskubectl – a spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster

https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl

by pabs3 • 1 year ago

274 75 1 year ago

github.com

adra• 1 year ago

I don't care if this works or not it makes me giddy with glee at the idea. Thanks for making my day.

a0122• 1 year ago

I'd be a great April 1st joke to replace ArgoCD by this spreadsheet

BirAdam• 1 year ago

Taken the complex and making it so simple, fantastic.

awsanswers• 1 year ago

This is useful and necessary software. Keep going. This can be a wonderful demystifyer for some and a useful tool for others.

jaimehrubiks• 1 year ago

Amazing software, a must have. They never merged my PR though.

casper14• 1 year ago

The README and faq are really funny. "What??" as the first question is gold

test6554• 1 year ago

Now let’s map helm config files to csv and use pivot tables for networking

Gee101• 1 year ago

Does it mean you can give it Finance and get rid of the IT Operations team?

bionsystem• 1 year ago

Yes and give a well deserved bonus to those finance guys.

dstanko• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

There was https://eric-jadi.medium.com/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-c... too.

fragmede• 1 year ago

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.

osigurdson4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

They’re not worse than YAML…

cm2187• 1 year ago

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.

osigurdson4• 1 year ago

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.

osigurdson4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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!

freedomben3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Infrastructure as Excel for Cloud Services:)

ccakes• 1 year ago

https://github.com/storax/kubedoom

Obligatory Doom mention

speedgoose• 1 year ago

k3s with the default SQLite based storage instead of ETCD works very well for single node kubernetes instances.

friendzis• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Now it just needs a kubectl plugin to launch Google sheets webpage with carbonyl for e2e terminal use

baq2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

the bar is in hell

hnlmorg4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

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.

johannes1234321• 1 year ago

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 ...

trollbridge• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Anything is better than cursed yaml

dhab• 1 year ago

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_• 1 year ago

Is this feature what you're looking for?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...

philips• 1 year ago

Today I learned.

Here is the doc for Google sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/63175?hl=en&co=GENIE....

rickdeckard• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes

Great trolling in the name as well

ithkuil• 1 year ago

Other possible names:

kubexls

kubecalc

tabelnetes

kube123

Aeolun• 1 year ago

It’s called xls, but it uses Google sheets?

mrweasel• 1 year ago

Someone needs to go build gsheetkubectl, for Microsoft Excel.

SSLy• 1 year ago

…now with Power BI data source!

benterix• 1 year ago

This made my day!

raffraffraff• 1 year ago

Would love to mix this up with FluxCD

_joel• 1 year ago

Goodbye GitOps. Hello AccountingOps

formerly_proven• 1 year ago

There is already FinOps...

eichin• 1 year ago

The "inspired by" link is to a reddit thread that uses (coins?) the term "SheetOps"...

nextts• 1 year ago

Now quants can do devops

stuff4ben• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

A Jira version. Children look under the bed afraid of finding monsters. Monsters look under the bed afraid of finding you.

a0122• 1 year ago

Fantastic, now my PM can just go ahead create a ticket to scale the workloads without having me to update the spreadsheet again

organsnyder• 1 year ago

How about a Workday version? Maybe also one integrated with an Epic EMR somehow?

freedomben3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Please do. My manager is going to love this.

ryanisnan• 1 year ago

This is a cursed project, but I can't help but admire it.

baq2• 1 year ago

Yaml is more cursed. This is great.

freedomben3• 1 year ago

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!

itomato• 1 year ago

Bruh: https://www.packtpub.com/en-in/learning/tech-news/atlassian-...

layer8• 1 year ago

Maybe someone could make xlsiptables.

arkh• 1 year ago

I'm disappointed it does not run in excel but uses a google spreadsheet.

crest• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

sick bastard

brainzap• 1 year ago

I actually export a spreadsheet to review the memory limits.

matttproud• 1 year ago

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.)

guax• 1 year ago

Someday at the office:

What do you mean our auto scaling strategy stopped working when we switched to Office 360?

xlskubectl – a spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster

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