Why another magic cli (gotk) instead of declarative description (code) ?

[vladimirfx]

I've carefully read the manual and confused with big amount of cli calls needed to configure resources. Especially in comparison to FluxCD 1.x .
What a point in such drift from declarative to imperative approach with huge commands? (witch is very error prone, I've tried to 'compile' it myself)
Didn't GitOps means code, not cli? Ok, with minimal cluster bootstrap. I think I missing something... Can you clarify please?

PS: we are using FluxCD based on multi tenant sample and looking to new GitOps toolkit as Flux successor.

[stefanprodan]

The GitOps Toolkit is made out of Kubernetes manifests (for installation) and Kubernetes custom resources (for configuration). The CLI gives you the option to install and configure the toolkit with commands instead of YAMLs.

[vladimirfx]

Thanks for such detailed response! Current Getting started guid slightly confused me by extensive usage of gotk tool. In our current workflow (Flux) most of team are not using special GitOps cli tools and someone even not known about it existence. Cluster usually bootstrapped by Ops team. Then it used declarative mostly way by changing configs in Git (copy-edit-verify-commit).

[Starefossen]

Second what @vladimirfx. We set up everything automatically and prefer to either use Terraform or from Git via Flux so having to run a gotk command does not fit very well to either of these two workflows and creates a sort of arbitrary step where we have to run gotk at the end (or in the middle) of our pipeline for boostrapping new clusters.

[phillebaba]

One option may be to write a terraform provider as an alternative to the CLI. It might be a bit tricky building the state sync though as we would need to reverse what the CLI does.

[vladimirfx]

As I understand @stefanprodan all setup done by gotk can be reproduced by k8s manifests. IMO It can be deployed by terraform kustimoze provider. Our ops team are prototyping such setup.

[vladimirfx]

Second what @vladimirfx. We set up everything automatically and prefer to either use Terraform or from Git via Flux so having to run a gotk command does not fit very well to either of these two workflows and creates a sort of arbitrary step where we have to run gotk at the end (or in the middle) of our pipeline for boostrapping new clusters.

We successfully bootstrapped several clusters by Terraform and Kustomize which is managed by gotk afterward. To do so we generate set of gotk manifests as documented in getting started guide for custom git repo. Then add simple kustomization that replaces gotk-system repository target and secrets. When cluster is bootstrapped by Terraform we apply gotk-system kustomization (with Terraform as well) and then we manage cluster by means of gotk (mostly).