Genericity

What is the layer of genericity ?
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While trying to find a generic approach to deploy any infrastructure with a non-vendor-lock-in API, we looked at existing approaches. None of them proposed such an API, so we had to pave the way to a new future. But we did not know how to do it.

One day, after deploying infrastructures with Victor, we realised it was the solution. Indeed, Victor is able to deploy any Pulumi stack. This imply that the solution was already before our eyes: a Pulumi stack.

This consist the genericity layer, as easy as this.

Pulumi as the solution

To go from theory to practice, we had to make choices. One of the problem with a large genericity is it being… large, actually.

If you consider all ecosystems covered by Pulumi, to cover them you’ll require all runtimes installed on the host machine. For instance, the Pulumi Docker image is around 1.5 GB. This imply that a generic solution covering all ecosystems would be around 2 GB of memory.

Moreover, the enhancements you can propose in a language would have to be re-implemented similarly in every language, or transpiled. As transpilation is a heavy task, either manual or automatic but with a high error rate, it is not suitable for production.

Our choice was to focus on one language first (Golang), and later permit transpilation in other languages if technically automatable with a high success rate. With this choice, we would only have to deal with the Pulumi Go Docker image, around 200 MB (a 7.5 reduction factor). It could be even more reduced using minified images, using the Slim Toolkit or Chainguard Apko.

From the idea to an actual tool

With those ideas in mind, we had to transition from TRLs by implementing it in a tool. This tool could provide a service, thus the architecture was though as a Micro Service.

Doing so enable other Micro Services or CTF platforms to be developed and reuse the capabilities of chall-manager. We can then imagine plenty other challenges kind that would require Challenge on Demand:

We already plan creating 1 and 2.

What’s next