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First off: congratulations on shipping something! Shipping is hard. But this misses the mark. With respect, and I'm trying to not not dunking on your project,

First off: congratulations on shipping something! Shipping is hard. But this misses the mark. With respect, and I'm trying to not not dunking on your project, to me Ansible is the worst of every world and is emblematic of configuration management retreating from the realm of "infrastructure as code" to "infrastructure as magic notepad files because incurious sysadmins won't write code.". I don't really care that Ansible is being wrapped so long as, inevitably, I'm going to have to go deal with that when it breaks. Eventually Pulumi/Terraform will break too, and there is no programming language I have more eyerolls for than Golang, but at least it's a programming language, you know? (And I really don't relish the thought of ping-ponging from the Python wrapper to YAML hell to a Python module, tbh.) The biggest thing that a project like Freckles fails to capture, and where Pulumi shines, is that it's all code and you just treat it as code. They're compiler wonks, or at least the guy I know there is one, and they leverage that--when dealing with stuff like Lambdas/GCP Cloud Functions, you just write them inline and they're hoisted into deployable packages without comment or incident. There's no zipping of files, there's no messing around--you wrote a function to do a thing and it gets run. Done-and-done. It's got a lot of other nice features, but that it is transparently code, and that they're investing most of their effort (it seems) into hiding the unfortunate fact that eventually some Terraform providers get run, makes Pulumi a really hard one to top.

_frkl 7y ago
Fair enough, I can see some of your points, but (obviously) I don't think they are entirely relevant, and my experience and view of Ansible is a different one. Also, Ansible is only one backend for freckles, it's just the first one I implemented because of all the roles and modules already available for it. There will be a Terraform backend, and a Packer one, and a Kubernetes one too, probably. And I'm actually much more excited about the shell backend I have in mind, but that is much more work to create a repository of tasks for. You'll be able to just select one of those backends, or combine all of them. The goal is for 'end-users' never having to deal with underlying backends and Ansible code and the like, if they don't want to. Those are just there to provide the building blocks end users would use to compose their provisioning/orchestration -- which they can do entirely in code. I hope to have a stable 'stdlib' of such tasks at some point, comparable to what is available in Pulumi, which people can just use without any other concern. I don't know how Pulumi works under the hood, are you saying they basically wrap Terraform modules? If that's the case, that's not that different to how freckles works. With the exception that freckles can also be used for non-cloud things.

_frkl 7y ago

Fair enough, I can see some of your points, but (obviously) I don't think they are entirely relevant, and my experience and view of Ansible is a different one. Also, Ansible is only one backend for freckles, it's just the first one I implemented because of all the roles and modules already available for it. There will be a Terraform backend, and a Packer one, and a Kubernetes one too, probably. And I'm actually much more excited about the shell backend I have in mind, but that is much more work to create a repository of tasks for. You'll be able to just select one of those backends, or combine all of them. The goal is for 'end-users' never having to deal with underlying backends and Ansible code and the like, if they don't want to. Those are just there to provide the building blocks end users would use to compose their provisioning/orchestration -- which they can do entirely in code. I hope to have a stable 'stdlib' of such tasks at some point, comparable to what is available in Pulumi, which people can just use without any other concern. I don't know how Pulumi works under the hood, are you saying they basically wrap Terraform modules? If that's the case, that's not that different to how freckles works. With the exception that freckles can also be used for non-cloud things.