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'People are screaming out today that "devops is a big waste of time" and I think 80% of that is that Packer and Vagrant are so awful and putting another layer i

'People are screaming out today that "devops is a big waste of time" and I think 80% of that is that Packer and Vagrant are so awful and putting another layer is going to make it 95% awfulness from Hashicorp.' Awful compared to what? 'And then there is the issue that when Vagrant can't talk to the mothership, it doesn't work right. It goes on and on.' I'm curious, which package management tool have you seen that works when it can't talk to the mothership? Hashicorp has a particular philosophy of how it builds and ships its ecosystem: small, standalone, composed tools. That leads to some overlap and inconsistent quality, as they evolve independently. Atlas is supposed to smooth over the overall experience, but, software is hard. Alternative ecosystems tend to be large pills to swallow (i.e. PaaS), though they might have a better overall experience.

stephenr 11y ago
> Vagrant can't talk to the mothership, it doesn't work right I'm going to assume this is about not being able to detect/handle version upgrades of base boxes if they're not in Atlas (or if you're offline). This is my issue with this ecosystem too - Atlas is a "free" service but to use/run an alternative "Atlas" would mean reverse engineering it (if there is a spec detailing the endpoints, calls, payloads expected/accepted I'd love to hear about it!). As for "which package manager works it can't talk to the mothership": Debian's Apt/Dpkg can work from a purely offline mirror on the local disk if you want. RPM can too. But more likely you'll want to use your own private repo. Possibly just a mirror of the upstream repo. Maybe your own packages. Maybe a mix of both.
- parasubvert 11y ago
  "Atlas is a "free" service but to use/run an alternative "Atlas" would mean reverse engineering it (if there is a spec detailing the endpoints, calls, payloads expected/accepted I'd love to hear about it!)." No official spec to my knowledge, but there are a couple of attempts at this https://github.com/hollodotme/Helpers/blob/master/Tutorials/vagrant/self-hosted-vagrant-boxes-with-versioning.md https://github.com/hollodotme/Helpers/blob/master/Tutorials/... https://www.nopsec.com/news-and-resources/blog/2015/3/27/private-vagrant-box-hosting-easy-versioning/ https://www.nopsec.com/news-and-resources/blog/2015/3/27/pri... "Debian's Apt/Dpkg can work from a purely offline mirror on the local disk if you want" Okay, but Vagrant caches boxes on the local disk too.... if one runs "box update --box --provider" in a scheduled job.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    Re: apt, I meant there are well documented ways to host a complete apt repo either on your own server or even offline (eg the Debian cd/dvd images are the same structure) Thanks for the references - I did find a reference to an environment variable in the vagrant source somewhere so maybe it can work reasonably well with a private reverse engineered "atlas"

stephenr 11y ago

> Vagrant can't talk to the mothership, it doesn't work right I'm going to assume this is about not being able to detect/handle version upgrades of base boxes if they're not in Atlas (or if you're offline). This is my issue with this ecosystem too - Atlas is a "free" service but to use/run an alternative "Atlas" would mean reverse engineering it (if there is a spec detailing the endpoints, calls, payloads expected/accepted I'd love to hear about it!). As for "which package manager works it can't talk to the mothership": Debian's Apt/Dpkg can work from a purely offline mirror on the local disk if you want. RPM can too. But more likely you'll want to use your own private repo. Possibly just a mirror of the upstream repo. Maybe your own packages. Maybe a mix of both.

parasubvert 11y ago
"Atlas is a "free" service but to use/run an alternative "Atlas" would mean reverse engineering it (if there is a spec detailing the endpoints, calls, payloads expected/accepted I'd love to hear about it!)." No official spec to my knowledge, but there are a couple of attempts at this https://github.com/hollodotme/Helpers/blob/master/Tutorials/vagrant/self-hosted-vagrant-boxes-with-versioning.md https://github.com/hollodotme/Helpers/blob/master/Tutorials/... https://www.nopsec.com/news-and-resources/blog/2015/3/27/private-vagrant-box-hosting-easy-versioning/ https://www.nopsec.com/news-and-resources/blog/2015/3/27/pri... "Debian's Apt/Dpkg can work from a purely offline mirror on the local disk if you want" Okay, but Vagrant caches boxes on the local disk too.... if one runs "box update --box --provider" in a scheduled job.
- stephenr 11y ago
  Re: apt, I meant there are well documented ways to host a complete apt repo either on your own server or even offline (eg the Debian cd/dvd images are the same structure) Thanks for the references - I did find a reference to an environment variable in the vagrant source somewhere so maybe it can work reasonably well with a private reverse engineered "atlas"