evanphx

The honest answer to your question about where the line is: it's when you start writing your own health checks, restart logic, and deployment orchestration on top of compose. That's the tipping point where you're maintaining infrastructure instead of just running apps.

We built Miren for exactly this middle ground. Push to the cluster, it handles image building, TLS, and deployment on any Linux server. No Dockerfile, no compose, no Kubernetes. Autoscaling is on by default. It's not that Kubernetes is wrong, it's that there should be something between compose scripts and a full cluster.

We're actively working on ways of deploying already ready services in docker files to the cluster, which would probably be what you're looking for initially unless the cluster you're doing a lot of development on the cluster.

Are you doing that across a fleet of machines or just one?

Totally, it's all about the primitives. I'm curious where exe.dev is gonna build on the the base, or just leave it up to folks to add all their own bespoke stuff to do containers, logs, etc.

The last 20 years has given us a lot of great primitives for folks to plug in, I think that lots of people don't want to wrangle those primitives, they just want to use them.

Upon hearing this (and seeing the software that you've got listed on the website) I went and bought one. Looks great!

It's very true that things like timeouts are done better within the client library. But Templar can combine timeouts with caching, allowing an API to appear to still be active and returning something even when it's just very slow.

Because a cache is best when it's populated often, it make sense to put that into a service that many different processes on different machines can use.

Everything within templar can be done by adding capabilities to client libraries, no argument. But most client libraries don't provide these capabilities in one programming language, let alone many of them. By having the functional available as a service, Templar provides these capabilities fairly transparently (and even more transparently in the future when there is per/host and per/url configuration).

That assumes nginx has the capability to do what Templar does and I don't believe that's true.

Templar does not do SSL termination because it does not terminate requests for your api. It's designed to mediate connections between you and any APIs that you use, protecting you against those APIs being unreliable.

Yup! That's on the todo list. Auto-caching, as I'm calling it, would figure out a how long to cache something for and then be able to later on use HEAD to check if the url in question has changed.

That cache time could be as long as 5 seconds, so that Templar is checking pretty often if the upstream has changed.