Hey, I'm the person behind this project. Thank you for sharing this. Many people have reached out to improve it, and I might come back with a Jira version one day.
when you get a chance, please add Office 97 compatibility and release an Electron-based native app. Also the page doesn't load properly on IE6. Thanks!
Love it.
I generally avoided excel when my previous role was a dev.
Now, leading a team - I find it more useful as it's a little universe to add various computations (counts, min, max) of various sorts of data that I want to keep track across projects & create charts etc, create rapid UIs (project timelines etc) and easily change them when required, invite collaborators, use that to replace slides to drive meeting discussions
It's quite versatile.
I had never considered this angle of using it to manage and sync with something external like Kubernetes here and love it.
I wish someone also solved the issue with excel around refactoring though - esp when cells are being used in formulas, if there was a "Find All References" or Cmd+SHIFT+F (global find) of elements used in formula (not their values) - it would step it up even more towards maintainability.
(I understand it buckles under huge datasets, but I believe that's really over-use of the tool)
> I wish someone also solved the issue with excel around refactoring though - esp when cells are being used in formulas, if there was a "Find All References" or Cmd+SHIFT+F (global find) of elements used in formula (not their values) - it would step it up even more towards maintainability.
I usually handle this in MS Excel by searching "in workbook" and "in formulas".
Works even better when the elements are in a named cell which is referenced in formulas (i.e. "stat.infra.APIrequests" instead of "$A$5"), this way you can also globally change the element by reassigning the cell-name to another cell
The problem with spreadsheets vs regular tables is that spreadsheets allow for a lot of customisation (which is kind of the point of a spreadsheet vs a table).
As a programming interface, that makes spreadsheets deceptively powerful. But as a UI were you need to have control over how the user interacts, that makes spreadsheets incredibly painful to integrate.
Source: myself. I worked on a project around 20 years ago which integrated a spreadsheet into its UI and the number of ways people would break the application each month was mind boggling.
I wonder… there are all sorts of cloud offerings for office suites nowadays. Google, Microsoft.
If you have a shared spreadsheet in one of these systems, surely there must be some way to lock down some rows and columns, right? Then, the spreadsheet simply becomes a program where intermediary values are displayed and can be read. It seems really convenient.
There are ways. But there’s also countless ways you can mess with the contents. Plus the problem that spreadsheet “administrators” need to unlock to make their changes and remember to re-enable those locks when they’re done.
At some point, something invariably gets missed and someone else finds a way to tamper with it.
Bear in mind that the “tamperers” are never doing so maliciously. They’re just trying to do their job too. But when you have a UI that allows for unlimited abstractions, those “tamperers” will dream up a new way to represent their needs without realising that they’re breaking someone else’s workflow.
The great thing about spreadsheets is that most grown ups understand them.
I've used it as the best UI for Accountants, Lawyers and other people that are famous for being afraid of technology. It's a great "bridge between "the system" and the people who want to get something from it.
If I were an accountant, I would be afraid of a lot of technology. In particular, if somebody offered me a Python code, and I didn’t know Python, I’d be quite worried about the handling of rounding and that sort of stuff, by some random programmer.
Excel was also written by some random programmer. But the code that does anything complicated was at least used by everybody in my field, so if there’s a hidden bug in there, at least the responsibility is diffuse. And the code written by me or by someone at my office… well, you can at least see what every cell does.
You speak to me as an insurance guy that also writes code to get things done. Excel is everywhere. So - everyone has the same lens/bug. Also, rounding/numbers in SQL
I’m not disputing spreadsheets as an assessable IDE for “non-programmers”.
I’m a big fan of spreadsheets for “getting shit done”.
But if you’re building a UI for other people to consume, you’ll quickly find that they’d break it in all manner of exotic ways.
This is why CRUD solutions exist. Sometimes you want the relational bookkeeping but with a more restricted UI. In those type of scenarios even MS Access is a better option than Excel (for example).
In fact as a configuration file, spreadsheets are a much superior UI, you can change lots of numbers very quickly if your config is tabular in nature. Whether it is a good idea that what you type should modify a prod environment live is a different question. Working in finance and living in spreadsheet it sounds like a terrible design to me. You want to be to inspect the whole config change before it affects the target system.
Also in spreadsheet you can do proper computation, reference other values, make VLOOKUPs. So much better than YAML where the entire ecosystem seems to pretend there isn't a need for abstraction in configs.
Just need Factorio integration. Given output from k describe pods -A, generate a blueprint with ingress represented by a belt balancer/splitter bit that feeds into furnaces leading to assemblers leading into boxes representing storage or something.
I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes, but I dig the notion of using a spreadsheet as a control interface. Does anyone know of a similar paradigm for other sysadmin applications?
> I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes
I reckon majority of operations do not strictly need distributed nature of Kubernetes and for many SMBs, which comfortably fit into one or two rack units plus maybe a storage shelf, that's even counterproductive.
However, Kubernetes, being resource virtualization platform, offers some very nice isolation and admin access control capabilities. I guess that's the power of kubernetes for most orgs.
I dunno, I tried making an example pod definition in a spreadsheet just to see what it looks like. It isn't better or more readable as everything is indented too much.
If it was read-only I wouldn't hate it so much. A table view of all my resources wouldn't be bad. But heaven forbidden if I hit a random number in a random cell!
I would hope it's smart enough to automatically convert any values in the cell to a number. For example if I type "a" into the cell, it should create 97 replicas
This has to be the perfect passive aggressive comeback to bitchslap a project manager with a mirco-management fetish into the PaaS cost control limits the moment they demonstrate the power at their fingertips by adding a few zeroes. You have setup those limits didn't you, project manager?
This would be awesome - let's make finance responsible for infrastructure! That way they can at the same time save a lot of money, and be accountable (pun intended) for the impact they make by "saving" money.
It's quite versatile. I had never considered this angle of using it to manage and sync with something external like Kubernetes here and love it.
I wish someone also solved the issue with excel around refactoring though - esp when cells are being used in formulas, if there was a "Find All References" or Cmd+SHIFT+F (global find) of elements used in formula (not their values) - it would step it up even more towards maintainability.
(I understand it buckles under huge datasets, but I believe that's really over-use of the tool)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...
Here is the doc for Google sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/63175?hl=en&co=GENIE....
I usually handle this in MS Excel by searching "in workbook" and "in formulas". Works even better when the elements are in a named cell which is referenced in formulas (i.e. "stat.infra.APIrequests" instead of "$A$5"), this way you can also globally change the element by reassigning the cell-name to another cell
Spreadsheets are underused as an UI. Every time you embed a table component in your app you probably wouldn’t complain about it being one.
As a programming interface, that makes spreadsheets deceptively powerful. But as a UI were you need to have control over how the user interacts, that makes spreadsheets incredibly painful to integrate.
Source: myself. I worked on a project around 20 years ago which integrated a spreadsheet into its UI and the number of ways people would break the application each month was mind boggling.
If you have a shared spreadsheet in one of these systems, surely there must be some way to lock down some rows and columns, right? Then, the spreadsheet simply becomes a program where intermediary values are displayed and can be read. It seems really convenient.
At some point, something invariably gets missed and someone else finds a way to tamper with it.
Bear in mind that the “tamperers” are never doing so maliciously. They’re just trying to do their job too. But when you have a UI that allows for unlimited abstractions, those “tamperers” will dream up a new way to represent their needs without realising that they’re breaking someone else’s workflow.
I've used it as the best UI for Accountants, Lawyers and other people that are famous for being afraid of technology. It's a great "bridge between "the system" and the people who want to get something from it.
Excel was also written by some random programmer. But the code that does anything complicated was at least used by everybody in my field, so if there’s a hidden bug in there, at least the responsibility is diffuse. And the code written by me or by someone at my office… well, you can at least see what every cell does.
I’m a big fan of spreadsheets for “getting shit done”.
But if you’re building a UI for other people to consume, you’ll quickly find that they’d break it in all manner of exotic ways.
This is why CRUD solutions exist. Sometimes you want the relational bookkeeping but with a more restricted UI. In those type of scenarios even MS Access is a better option than Excel (for example).
Excel pros (I am none) can do quite some nice tools on top of Excel.
Excel runs the world ...
I’ve already addressed this and the problems with that approach.
> Excel pros (I am none) can do quite some nice tools on top of Excel.
As I explained in my OP, I was one of them.
> Excel runs the world ...
I agree. I never claimed otherwise. So I don’t really understand your point here if it’s not to make a strawman argument.
"Replacing YAML with spreadsheets has always been our mission as a company, and we will continue to do so."
The python scripts were deployed PaaS style into a Kubernetes cluster.
If only we'd had the insight to manage our control plane via Excel also, we'd probably be squillionaires by now. :P
(joking in case people didn't look - 2 commits 5 years ago)
For a different sort of person, but there's some rather old efforts to expose Kubernetes & Etcd under FUSE , which would also be neat direct access. https://github.com/opencredo/KubeFuse https://github.com/cstavr/etcdfs
And since I was curious, there's also a spreadsheet to FUSE too, https://github.com/mk270/xls-fuse
As far as I know, the only 3d representation of Kubernetes is KubeDoom, https://github.com/storax/kubedoom
Great trolling in the name as well
kubexls
kubecalc
tabelnetes
kube123
I reckon majority of operations do not strictly need distributed nature of Kubernetes and for many SMBs, which comfortably fit into one or two rack units plus maybe a storage shelf, that's even counterproductive.
However, Kubernetes, being resource virtualization platform, offers some very nice isolation and admin access control capabilities. I guess that's the power of kubernetes for most orgs.
Obligatory Doom mention
(Or more like putting the manager back in the management plane.)
What do you mean our auto scaling strategy stopped working when we switched to Office 360?