Proposal: untied generation from folder structures

[orange-cloudfoundry]

Proposal: untied generation from folder structures

[poblin-orange]

Hello, thks for feedback and proposal.
Some thoughts:

• the main idea behind cf-ops-automation is standardizing complex bosh deployments (multiple directors, deployments, including cloudfoundry, services, and support tools), with convention over configuration / code orientation.
• as often (see bosh and cf), an opiniated approach limits somehow the freedom. Basically, there's nothing in cf-ops-automation you couldnt do with native concourse. Directory and naming is the convention we took to provide a descriptive automated deployment framework for production. Also, we wanted to have a strong separation between "reuseable aspects" and site specific secrets.

Im not sure the flexibility gained by removing central aspects of the cf-ops-automation makes sense, as the layer on top of concourse/bosh might be too thin to provide value

[ArthurHlt]

For your first point, it will be still the case.

Directory and naming convention is a too restrictive approach, this does not permit to others to use cf-ops-automation in their own environment without pain.

Even with this separation user still need, at some point, to make a link between his deployments and secrets for his site and environment. Sure, separate templating from stubs are interesting but there is a lack to those links easily, this proposal tried to find a way to do it.

It will be still automated, still separate, will still have a convention. it's just moving convention to another point to not be tied to a directory structure.

This is proposal and it's need to be refined to find a compromise.

[poblin-orange]

As illustrated by the usage of cf-deployment, bosh-deployment, the naming convention is quite convenient and can be adapted with symlinks.
Wrt secrets management, large scale credhub usage and operators reduce the need to generate any manifest.
The "site" dimension is out of scope of core COA. As git is the main source of truth, one is free to add any site/qa-integration-production workflow on top of different COA platform instance.