
Ask HN: What are the gaps in current infrastructure software? - what_to_build
There&#x27;s a lot of open infrastructure software out there, but it wasn&#x27;t until recently that some problems got decent solutions (like prometheus for monitoring, kubernetes for orchestration, minio for object storage). What problems could do with fresh implementations? What&#x27;s some internal software you wish had an open implementation?<p>If you had three months to work solidly on a new piece of open source infrastructure level software, where would you place your effort?<p>Use this thread to generally complain about infrastructure.
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benologist
The "boilerplate" needed to launch a web application, to make anything people
need to sign in to you have to add a bunch of functionality that we see many
services get wrong and do poorly, and it just gets worse as you add complex
functionality like subscriptions. It's a lot of work and a lot of margin for
error rewriting this stuff again and again.

I already started but I would spend 3 more months on this problem, trying to
separate the boring stuff into something reusable and better than rewriting:
[https://userdashboard.github.io/home](https://userdashboard.github.io/home)

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BjoernKW
Usability. Just recently I went down a particularly deep rabbit hole when I
tried to run Angular unit tests with a headless Chromium browser on a Jenkins
CI server.

Suddenly I found myself having to debug various Docker images, Jenkins files
and Kubernetes pods.

Not only are these tools often used indiscriminately, regardless of whether
they're actually needed for the use case at hand but there frequently also
seems to be an apparent disregard for the non-functional requirements of the
people using them.

Sure, I can launch "kubectl" or "docker exec -it" to see what's going on but
as someone who merely wants to run unit tests I shouldn't have to.

~~~
javcasas
> Angular unit tests

Talking as experienced front-end developer, currently working in an angular
project, I must indicate that there are no Angular unit tests in existence. A
unit test that requires a full browser to run is not a unit test, but a full
e2e test. Exactly the same as the endpoint tests that require opening a server
and binding to a port.

~~~
BjoernKW
With Jasmine tests running with "ng test" (i.e. with Karma test runner rather
than Protractor) the system-under-test usually is a single component,
directive or service.

Therefore, conceptually these indeed are unit tests.

You could argue that because a browser environment is required for running
these units the tests are integration tests.

Still, they're commonly referred to as unit tests (including the official
Angular documentation).

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jamieweb
Proper version-controlled DNS that is usable by non-developers.

Existing solutions like DnsControl and OctoDNS are great for
development/devops teams who are familiar with Git, CI/CD, editing files in-
line with a specific syntax and creating a merge request.

However, these can often be foreign concepts to general sysadmins or Windows
technicians.

What'd be great would be to have a nice web frontend that implements version
control with Git, and uses DnsControl or OctoDNS as the DNS-editing backend,
but completely abstracts this complexity away from the users.

A comparable problem would be that non-developers may find Git on the command-
line challenging, but the GitHub/GitLab web GUIs make it easy. I want to be
able to say: Non-developers find DnsControl and OctoDNS challenging, but _[x
open-source solution that doesn 't exist yet]_ makes it easy.

~~~
otterley
Can you elaborate on the business case here? Why would a business want to make
it easier for non-developers to implement infrastructure as code, when they
can give the task to the developers they already have, or hire more developers
who will also be able to do other things that add business value?

~~~
jamieweb
This is for organisations that either do not have skilled developers, or for
organisations where the development team doesn't look after core
infrastructure.

The target audience for this is traditional sysadmin roles and Windows
technicians - in other words, people who are not used to non-GUI stuff.

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toomuchtodo
Datadog/New Relic competitor (app telemetry), maybe built on top of
ELK/Graylog and Grafana.

Something to wrap around PostgreSQL to replicate RDS on your own infra
(monitoring, provisioning, snapshots and transaction log shipping to various
object stores).

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brodouevencode
Getting around AWS IAM, or making it into a standard all cloud providers could
adopt. As posted on HN a while back:
[https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/02/18/cloud-irregular-iam-
is...](https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/02/18/cloud-irregular-iam-is-the-real-
cloud-lock-in/)
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742038)).

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kodebrew
I've found deploying to all these new infrastructure tools is a big gap. I've
been open sourcing a tool [https://deliverybot.dev](https://deliverybot.dev)
that I built internally at my current org.

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ux4
Breaking down monolithic databases into microservices.

Containerism and modern devops practices become borderline impossible when
you're working with a monolithic database that's encumbered in complex
business processes. Ideally you're working with independent, decoupled
microservices, but that's far from the reality that most admins face.

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fillskills
DevSecOps automation/management system - Way to instrument, monitor, manage
and visualize DevSecOps

------
didip
Real multi cloud. I want to be able to spread my app all over the 3 public
cloud infrastructure.

~~~
o-__-o
Cloudcenter.

------
dlahoda
my yamls have hackful types system, dynamic type systems, and no OR(type x = a
of string| b of int) types, lack of language definitions (BNF).

~~~
dlahoda
and it is not clear at all how updates are merged on cluster and which will
definately fail, not proper math applied

