ambiguous istioctl commands (istioctl mixer rule create and istioctl create)

[rshriram]

Istioctl mixer commands use explicit verbs and resource names in the command line, resulting in both longer command lines and ambiguous command set.. The commands for route rules are
istioctl create|get|replace|delete -f <filename>
while the commands for mixer are
istioctl mixer rule create|get. There is no istioctl mixer rule replace|delete.

The documentation and usage is pretty confusing. The two formats need to be unified into something like
istioctl create|get|replace|delete -f <filename>, where the type of the command, resource, etc. can be specified as part of the YAML file. for example

cat <<EOF | istioctl create
type: mixer-rule
name: ratelimit
spec:
 rules:
 - aspects:
   - kind: quotas
     params:
       quotas:
       - descriptorName: RequestCount
         maxAmount: 5
         expiration: 1s
EOF

The command structure and documentation of istioctl command is not cohesive. Its messy at the moment. Istioctl replace follows istioctl mixer rule.

Need to fix this before final release.

Ccing folks who worked on istioctl. @esnible @mandarjog @ayj
cc @geeknoid

[ayj]

I already created #649 to track this issue but it was targeted for beta.

[kyessenov]

This is what mixer gives to us.

[kyessenov]

The work has to start from making changes to mixer to organize the configs. The hacky solution is to parse YAMLs in apiserver and dispatch them to mixer config server after rewriting URLs and content.

[ayj]

We can hack istioctl to use common top-level verbs but the specific syntax is likely to change in beta as we straightout the config API and server story. API server version checking could help for this early pre-beta breaking changes.

[kyessenov]

Issue moved to istio/galley #10 via ZenHub