My life with `kanku`

Tags:

Preamble

"My life with kanku" is intended to become a series of blog posts on the subjects of developing and using kanku in my daily business as OBS Backend Developer (mainly perl and python) and DevOps Engineer at SUSE.

History of kanku

kanku started as a small project in December 2015 with the goal to run some simple integration tests on a fresh install of the OBS-Appliance on a daily base.

At this time I already had a look into openQA. Which - BTW - is also a great tool for testing and integration.

Back then I got the impression openQA was not what I was looking for, but this is a different story.

After about 3 weeks of development it turned out that the resulting architecture of my first Proof-of-Concept allowed us to create two tools for different use cases but sharing the same principles, patterns and modules (kanku-common).

At this time the idea of separating "Developer mode" (kanku-cli) and "Server mode" with the ability to scale horizontally (over multiple hardware servers, hosting kanku-worker) was born.

kanku? Funny name! Whats the story behind?

I was searching for a nice name for my new tool which should not be a acronym like "openCICD" or something like "Opensource::ContinousIntegration::ContinousDeployment::Framework".

As I'm fascinated by Mixed Martial Arts since I can remember, I decided to search my former teacher's website for a:

  • short word
  • easy to type
  • not common in English
  • with no overlaping software project or product

and I stumbled over the word "kanku".

I had a feeling that this would be the perfect match for my tool without knowing why.

Eh? WTF? I still do not understand. Why kanku?

After a while ... and some philosophical high-proof sessions ... the scales fell off my eyes.

I discovered the long sought similarities between the "Kanku" karate kata and my new tool.

Wikipedia about kata:

  • It is practiced in Japanese martial arts as a way to memorize and perfect the movements being executed.
  • by practicing in a repetitive manner the learner develops the ability to execute those techniques and movements in a natural, reflex-like manner.

So, a kata (like "Kanku Dai" or "Kanku Sho") is a series of predefined actions which you should execute repeatedly to gain perfection.

  • With kanku you could practice your "kata" (kanku job) for your own.
  • Or you could present a proof of skills in an public examination or in front of a selected audience.

Thats it for my first "MLWK" blog post.

Next time I will present some easy but smart KankuFile snippets depending on the newest staging version of kanku.

Stay tuned!

Cheers M0ses