ae

UNIX inspired CLI Client for Aurae

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📑 Table of Contents

About The Project

ae is a UNIX inspired CLI client for Aurae, written in Go. However, in order to understand what ae should and can do, we must first understand aer.

What is aer?

aer is a CLI tool based on the Rust client which has the identical scope as a single auraed node.

The tool is aimed at "POWER-USERS" and exists as a rapid way to develop and debug against APIs that change frequently. For example, an auraed developer can make a change to an existing API and test it locally against a single daemon.

What is ae?

We have created and maintain a CLI tool, ae that is based on the Go client and has a broader view than aer.

The purpose will be to use ae for clusters of Aurae nodes and will probably work similar to aer, but not completely!

The ae CLI tool will work for a group of nodes and will probably contain more pragmatic functions that are more important for enterprise operators.

Who is ae for?

The ae utility should be familiar to every cloud operator.

Typical tasks such as:

• "Rolling out NGINX to production"
• "Counting the numbers of threads of a process"
• "Changing the current database connection count for a service"
• "Swinging traffic from one to another"

should be possible with ae.

There are more "practical" and "impact-oriented" tasks, and these probably need extra functionality, which they add to the lightweight aer tool.

Quickstart

This section is reserved for future installation instructions as well as an example of integration.

Usage

There are a number of commands for ae.

These are shown here in alphabetical order.

ae allocate
ae allocate cell
ae allocate pod

ae check <cidr <cidr> | ip <ip>> <service, ...>

ae discover <cidr <cidr> | ip <ip>>

ae free
ae free cell
ae free pod

ae logs <options>

ae oci
ae oci create
ae oci delete
ae oci kill
ae oci start
ae oci status

ae start
ae start executable, exe
ae start container # Note this has an alias: 'ae oci start'

ae stop
ae stop executable, exe
ae stop container # Note this has an alias: 'ae oci kill'

Philosophy

Less is more

We do not want ae to become a junk drawer. In situations where we are considering bringing in new functionality to the project, we prefer to keep it out.

For example imagine we were considering bringing in a --filter flag or a --query flag which would allow for us to filter the output returned by ae. In this situation we could very well identify advanced query patterns and libraries that would make it possible to adopt this feature.

However, the feature comes at a maintenance cost, and frankly already exists in other tools. Instead of adopting a filter syntax and the associated burden that comes along with it, we instead focus on outputting to formats (such as JSON) which can easily be queried by existing tools (such as jq).

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Also known as "The Jurassic Park" rule.

In situations where functionality is made available or "is possible" because of current technical advancements or capabilities, we prefer to focus on the goals of ae instead of supporting optional features "just because we can".

For example imagine discovering a well written, and well regarded library that takes a Go struct and turns it into many formats which can be printed to the screen such as XML, JSON, YAML, TOML, BSON, and so on....

The project currently has established a need for JSON only, and plans to use jq for filtering and querying the data. In this case bringing the additional output types to the project "just because we can" would be a violation of this rule.

No assumptions

Also known as "no conveniences" or "no magic" policies.

Assumptions and conveniences can delight a user, until the assumption is wrong in which case they can be catastrophically frustrating. We prefer to stay away from assumptions whenever possible. We prefer to stay away from "magic" and "convenience" style features.

A famous example of this is bringing a logger to a project which assumes that the logger will be able to take ownership of the -v flag for verbose. There are many situations (docker -v for volume, or grep -v for reverse) where this assumption is flawed and will conflict with the goals of the project and panic at runtime. We do not want ae to turn into the logger where we assume something incorrectly that ends up causing problems for others.

This will be a delicate principle to consider, as we also will need to hold firm opinions on things. A balance between a strong opinion and false assumptions is often times hard to get right.

For example the ae project will need to read from a configuration file in order to communicate with a remote server. In one case we could assume that the configuration file is always in a familiar location for convenience. In the other case we do not want to force a user to pass a very long flag every time they run the tool. What do we do?

We hold the opinion that the file should be in a few well documented locations, and create logic to try the locations if no flag is passed. If a user passes a flag we should remove all assumptions from the program and only consider the input. We prefer clarity over magic.

Remote Servers instead of Local Systems!

This is an interesting principle to consider. As the functionality of the ae tool grows we will inevitably need to execute logic somewhere.

We prefer to keep the ae tool as "boring" and "unintelligent" as possible. We do not want the command line tool to do a lot of "work" or "processing" locally. In situations where we need to perform logic against a set of Aurae nodes, we need to find a way to take the logic out of ae for compatibility reasons.

We do not want to get into a situation where we have multiple clients attempting to perform slightly different tasks locally against a server. Especially when these clients are subject to take long periods of time for their work to complete.

In the event these types of situations arise, it is a sign that we likely need to deploy a scheduler or server mechanisms somewhere to manage the work on our behalf.

Contribute

The Aurae project is always looking for new members and developers. Here in this repository you can improve ae, but be sure to check out the organisation and the other internal projects. This is always a good starting point.

Code Quality

Linting

We are using the golangci-lint tool to lint the code. You will need to install it for your system, and can find instructions at this link. This tool runs on every pull request, and it must pass before merging is allowed. You can run it locally with make lint.

Formatting

We are using the gofmt tool to lint the code. This tool runs on every pull request, and it must pass before merging is allowed. You can run it locally with make format.