Kibana provides a tool for config validation

[mshustov]

Currently, Kibana provides no tools to validate a config before and when running the server.
The only available option is to start the server and get a validation error message when it crashes.

It might be a problem in some environments. As @pmuellr pointed out, Cloud has to duplicate validation rules for configuration, even though they aren't complete by definition. So it might turn out that when a user applies config changes on Cloud, a value can be accepted in Cloud UI, but Kibana will fail to start due to a validation error.

Kibana could provide config validation as an HTTP service or CLI tool so that a customer can provide a json/yml config for validation and get a list of errors back. We should talk to the Cloud team, what option is preferable for them.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-core (Team:Core)

[mshustov]

a suggestion from @pmuellr

My thought was that we’d run an instance of Kibana - one instance for every version of Kibana supported - that had a special plugin which exposed a config validation service - input is JSON/YAML config, output is “OK” | error object with validation error messages.
Riffing off that, if we did have something like that, we could let Kibana manage the allow-listing of cloud config keys as well, instead of the simpler allow-list processing done in cloud today.

[pgayvallet]

Does anyone knows who we should reach on Cloud's side to begin the discussion? @joshdover @kobelb maybe?

[mshustov]

@pgayvallet you can address this question to #cloud-stack-n-soln channel