The motivation behind this blog post originates from a really cool blog post by Mike Brown who shared an interesting Telco use case for wanting to running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and centrally managing TKG Workload Clusters, which would run at each individual Edge/Cell Site location.
Awesome post from @vcdx71, lots of great nuggets! https://t.co/1tPFv1kpHf
1) 🔥@VMwareTanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) w/multi-vCenter Servers
2) 📈 Continue adoption of #VMWonAWS for DC Evac & extending to Edge Mgmt
3)📡 Cell Site/RAN mention,♥️ innovations from Telco customers
— William Lam (@lamw) July 13, 2021
While reading through Mike's blog post, I noticed one of the steps was to edit the generated YAML from the TKG Management Cluster which would then be used to deploy the individual TKG Workload Clusters. This would need to happen for each new deployment 😮 and of course, this could be very error prone and frustrating for end users. Here is an example of what the YAML file looks like which is over 1K+ lines!
This screams for automation and I had been looking for a reason to try out YTT again, which is a YAML templating tool that is part of the open source project Carvel. Although I had played with YTT before, it did not feel intuitive, especially for a new user who was trying to solve a quick problem. I figured this was my opportunity to take another look at YTT.
After a couple of hours and a lot of trial/error, I ended up with a partial solution and realized that I would not be able to figure this out given there were even more complicated sections within the YAML. I felt the bar to getting started with YTT was still too high and it may not be the right tool for this particular situation. I opted for a quicker solution using sed, which I had experience with before, but I also know that depending on the problem, sed can be just as complex and I also dislike regular expressions 🙂