Tikal FuseDay 2024 | Radar Task Generator (RTG)
TLDR; a short intent for this years upcoming hackathon @Tikal — is this a leap forward in DevOps Efficiency ? — let’s see this evening …
Intro
Once a year, Tikal hosts its renowned FuseDay, a tradition that unites ten squads in a spirited hackathon, each embarking on unique projects. This year, my squad (#5) and I are thrilled to introduce the “RTG Radar Task Generator” (RTG), a pioneering project poised to revolutionize how developers interact with AI to set up local development environments.
What is RTG ?
The RTG | Radar Task Generator is designed to transform conversations into actionable task files. Specifically, RTG aims to generate a Taskfile.yml — or other formats in future iterations — tailored to streamline the setup of complex development environments like Kubernetes using k3d, complete with a local registry, DNS, and other essential components.
Go-task is A task runner / simpler Make alternative written in Go as a developer with an Operations background these “makefiles” have saved my day more than once.
I’ve written a bit about it like From yak shaving to mastering tasks and There’s no place like K3d continued which may give you a grasp on how strong these tools are and how the assist with onboarding new people to the team, now we will try to compose these with generative A.I.
Unlike standard AI tools, RTG promises precision, crafting setups that are finely tuned to the specific needs of DevOps professionals. When we cover local development based on some “primitives” the way we call certain tools and the common way of how we configure things — this can be now reused an augmented by our context and the different A.I engines large language models to help us do our job faster !
So while the mvp will focus on local development environments and scenarios to aid our “common engineer” a way to get along when we the DevOps are asleep ;) … think of creating a setup from a local stack and plan / switch to a cloud provide by saying the key word
GCPand you get thetaskfile.ymlto do that … 💡💡💡
Why RTG ?
At Tikal, our Israeli Tech Radar guides us through the ever-evolving tech landscape, advising what to try, keep, start, or stop. RTG leverages this radar, combined with a vector database, to build a contextual foundation for queries.
This structure ensures that the generated tasks are not only accurate but also aligned with the latest and most effective technologies as recommended by our tech radar.
How will RTG work ?
RTG integrates cutting-edge technologies such as LangChain and ChromaDB to dynamically generate task files. During our Backend exploration, my colleague Gaby Tal and I delved into various tools, discovering frameworks like Haystack and LangChain. These discoveries have significantly shaped our approach, allowing us to harness the power of AI to meet the specific requirements of our users.
The MVP — “the prompt works”
Our main goal is to focus on what we’re good at, don’t sell me that “fake it till we make it” crap ;) — we know what to ask because we do it every day, we can augment these queries with data we’ve been working on in the past 2 decades … this is the start of our experience as prompt engineers …
So if we 🤞 “prompt engineer it “— we will make our lives easier in the next job we do in software … (looking forward to that !).
Who is our target audience ?
First and foremost ourselves — the different squads / individual engineers at Tikal, think of a system which can help you get a setup-recommendation by talking to an assistant … — everybody’s doing that why don’t we ?
We’ve the research we’ve been doing every respectable company in the world would eventually do this type of application, this is one of the main reasons A.I and digital assistance is no longer just a hype — but a necessity — it’s the way to move forward with solution driven thinking not something we can do by “winging it” … (well some very talented individuals can — not something you can build a solid business around).
Meet the squad
Our project is supported by a robust squad structure, including dedicated groups for Backend, Frontend, and DevOps. As for myself, I’ve taken on the role of “Product Manager” — a new challenge that I’ll share more about in upcoming posts.
Joining the squad are a few veteran Frontend’s Avichay Eyal and Shimi Bar which we hope will help enrich the user experience by providing a UI similar to openAI’s view with prompt history and maybe some recommendations, or references to “verified solutions”.
Our Backend is getting bigger with Zushe Brook with the python experience we need for LangChain — we need an API that will serve our frontend (any maybe 🙏🙏 a CLI— as a product I can only hope 😉) …
Our DevOps (3) are guys I know personally thus I will be putting a lot of our heavy lifting there in terms of running a secure and highly available infrastructure as much as possible … so Alex Zeleznikov, NatanBen Shushan Mor Danino we will be focusing on developer experience and production readiness (because we have such a large and experienced DevOps team)… I hope we could quickly utilize out gitlab-ci templates so CI (continuous Integration) should be “easy peasy” but will have to see how it goes later today.
What are operational plans ? i’m glad you asked …😉
We actually have a great starting point from an internal offering we built in-house temporarily named “Bootstrap” which uses a bunch of technologies which I love and use on a daily basis such as k3d, Crossplane, AWS, Helm, ArgoCD and a few more I may have forgotten, we use our own gitlab tenant so we already have a repository for that and that is our 1st infra move in the morning, then start with common controllers as you may have read in my production-ready series here on medium, external-secrets, dns and other services we will need to setup and configure.
Considering we Already have a vpc and eks driven by crossplane we will probably continue in that path for other managed services or resources we may need e.g. irsa roles or am rds etc etc.
The Backend is python which we know how to package and handle — we will need to consider the tooling (poetry / Dokcerfile etc) — we have some idea on how to do that ;)
Let’s not forget all this is worth nothing unless we get the “prompt to work” !
Stay tuned for more updates and insights as we gear up for a transformative experience at Tikal’s FuseDay 2024 — And we 🤞🤞 to write about how it was later tonight.
Your Sincerely, HP
