I drew inspiration from two excellent projects - giftless and truss - for the project's architecture. Both taught me a lot, and I wanted to build something similar to giftless but contained in an image so that I could more easily move around, test and deploy to different cloud backends without worrying about managing dependencies.

I split the codebase into a plugin architecture that allows you to specify which backends and manipulations to add to a configuration file. Additionally, I had to figure out how to handle secrets better. I opted for a source-drain technique where the config specifies the secret's source, such as Vault or an environment variable, which is then funneled into a "drain" (e.g., a hidden folder mounted on the Docker container). Could this approach be safer than using env vars? I also worked on some deployers and got the ECR upload working, which sends the Docker image to the registry for later deployment on App Runner.

While working on this project, I realized I had inadvertently built a Docker wrapper that could work for any Python API. This wrapper abstracts away Docker, secret management, plugins, and deployment, among others. I could run the build-context command and switch out the API file for whatever I wanted. I'm considering spinning that part out to make it a more API-agnostic tool.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. I'd be happy to discuss this further.