4 ms·

This seems to work only with cloud providers, not with dedi boxes / VPSs?

eropple 7y ago
"Cloud?" It can work with anything with an API. If there's a Terraform provider that they or the community hasn't projected into TypeScript (or whatever) you can do that yourself with minimal effort. Not sure what else you'd want.
- fock 7y ago
  How about plain old SSH? like all those low-end-boxes, you know ;).
  - eropple 7y ago
    I could write a provider to do so in a couple hours if one doesn't already exist. But frankly, if you're using those boxes you've already decided that your time is worth less than your money and spending time on automation is probably lower ROI than moving to something, anything, with an API. Anything that isn't IBM, anyway.
    - fock 7y ago
      Cool, if your provider will have a tested way to install packages, copy/template files and setup services beyond docker. Basically Ansible/Saltstack/Puppet/Chef _are_ the API for plain UNIX. As for the great "time worth less than money"-argument - I host my own nextcloud (for me and my family) on such a VPS for ~USD9. I get some 100GB of storage, ample RAM and CPU; sure that's probably oversubscribed, but after setup I can leave it running for years without worrying to check my bandwidth/storage quota in addition to it being cheaper than any big cloud-provider. Initial setup works with cloudinit and managing the VMs itself has an API. And I suppose for everyone not running a customer-facing business, the ROI of such solutions is basically unparalleled ;).
      - eropple 7y ago
        Thanks for the lecture; I didn't spend three years teaching Chef at a Fortune 100, I promise. You get that one can just write a thing to kick off instance-level CM if it doesn't exist, yeah? Like I don't know if it does for Pulumi because Pulumi doesn't seem to care much about trailing-edge systems--for now at least, it seems, they have a big enough market without having to stretch backwards--but it's not complicated; Terraform already has provisioners to do exactly that, so the pattern exists.
      - _frkl 7y ago
        > Basically Ansible/Saltstack/Puppet/Chef _are_ the API for plain UNIX. I've never thought about it like that, but I think you're exactly right. That's a really useful way to think about it. To me, anyway.
    - _frkl 7y ago
      Dunno, in my experience there is a long tail of use-cases where it is a more practical to work closer to system level (for different reasons: less complexity, political issues, legacy systems, etc.), so I don't think it's as black and white as you make it out to be. But I agree that there is a threshold after which 'everything API' is the way to go. Where that threshold is if often guesswork. Overall, I don't think our tooling is quite there, and we haven't found the right abstractions yet. Terraform and Pulumi are nice enough, but to me it looks like they are only treating the symptoms, instead of looking at the issues on a more holistic level. I don't have any good solution for that, but I think we'll need to try to look at everything we're doing from different perspectives than the ones we are used to. That's hard (at least for me), and it's getting harder the deeper we dive into the current layers of complexity wrapped into more complexity.

"Cloud?" It can work with anything with an API. If there's a Terraform provider that they or the community hasn't projected into TypeScript (or whatever) you can do that yourself with minimal effort. Not sure what else you'd want.

fock 7y ago
How about plain old SSH? like all those low-end-boxes, you know ;).
- eropple 7y ago
  I could write a provider to do so in a couple hours if one doesn't already exist. But frankly, if you're using those boxes you've already decided that your time is worth less than your money and spending time on automation is probably lower ROI than moving to something, anything, with an API. Anything that isn't IBM, anyway.
  - fock 7y ago
    Cool, if your provider will have a tested way to install packages, copy/template files and setup services beyond docker. Basically Ansible/Saltstack/Puppet/Chef _are_ the API for plain UNIX. As for the great "time worth less than money"-argument - I host my own nextcloud (for me and my family) on such a VPS for ~USD9. I get some 100GB of storage, ample RAM and CPU; sure that's probably oversubscribed, but after setup I can leave it running for years without worrying to check my bandwidth/storage quota in addition to it being cheaper than any big cloud-provider. Initial setup works with cloudinit and managing the VMs itself has an API. And I suppose for everyone not running a customer-facing business, the ROI of such solutions is basically unparalleled ;).
    - eropple 7y ago
      Thanks for the lecture; I didn't spend three years teaching Chef at a Fortune 100, I promise. You get that one can just write a thing to kick off instance-level CM if it doesn't exist, yeah? Like I don't know if it does for Pulumi because Pulumi doesn't seem to care much about trailing-edge systems--for now at least, it seems, they have a big enough market without having to stretch backwards--but it's not complicated; Terraform already has provisioners to do exactly that, so the pattern exists.
    - _frkl 7y ago
      > Basically Ansible/Saltstack/Puppet/Chef _are_ the API for plain UNIX. I've never thought about it like that, but I think you're exactly right. That's a really useful way to think about it. To me, anyway.
  - _frkl 7y ago
    Dunno, in my experience there is a long tail of use-cases where it is a more practical to work closer to system level (for different reasons: less complexity, political issues, legacy systems, etc.), so I don't think it's as black and white as you make it out to be. But I agree that there is a threshold after which 'everything API' is the way to go. Where that threshold is if often guesswork. Overall, I don't think our tooling is quite there, and we haven't found the right abstractions yet. Terraform and Pulumi are nice enough, but to me it looks like they are only treating the symptoms, instead of looking at the issues on a more holistic level. I don't have any good solution for that, but I think we'll need to try to look at everything we're doing from different perspectives than the ones we are used to. That's hard (at least for me), and it's getting harder the deeper we dive into the current layers of complexity wrapped into more complexity.