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Given this announcement I feel like I kinda have my answer. But I have to wonder how popular Puppet is now? I used it extensively... 6 years ago? somewhere in

Given this announcement I feel like I kinda have my answer. But I have to wonder how popular Puppet is now? I used it extensively... 6 years ago? somewhere in that range. I don't remember for sure. I went to training and though it worked pretty well. I remember there being a lot of excitement around Puppet. But since then I have moved more into AWS, with docker and serverless. Now I know as much as AWS and Docker love to claim otherwise... there is a large portion of companies that have not moved to this type of infrastructure. So I am legitimately curious where they stand. Now I have to imagine if I was ever in a situation where I needed to build a machine/image I would use Packer or EC2 Image Builder (I think that's the name).

xorcist 5y ago
It doesn't matter if it's AWS or an application.conf, you still want to manage the state of your infrastructure. That management might be Terraform and Helm, but it could easily be argued that a module for Puppet or Ansible would have several advantages. Unfortunately, instead of nourishing their open source roots they went corporate and began making enterprise products instead. It is an easy way to profitability but at the same time will make yourself less relevant for your user base. Compare with Docker Inc. and Elastic NV. They had the misfortune of doing this at the same time as Python was edging out Ruby's mindshare, also visible in the slow shift from Rails to Django over the decade, thereby doubling down on the road to slow irrelevancy. This is all pretty unfortunate since the sysadmin tooling in the cloud native era leaves a lot to be desired, but it is what it is.
heleninboodler 5y ago
Places that run tens or hundreds of thousands of machines generally really need something managing the mutable space between the base image and the container to make sure things get updated more or less continuously for security patches, user access, etc. This space gets a lot thinner with containers, but doesn't disappear completely, in my experience. This is where something like Puppet comes in. I know there's the immutable infra movement, but I don't know how practical it really is to shoot every single server in the head and recycle it when a critical vulnerability comes out. Maybe others have seen this, but I haven't.

xorcist 5y ago

It doesn't matter if it's AWS or an application.conf, you still want to manage the state of your infrastructure. That management might be Terraform and Helm, but it could easily be argued that a module for Puppet or Ansible would have several advantages. Unfortunately, instead of nourishing their open source roots they went corporate and began making enterprise products instead. It is an easy way to profitability but at the same time will make yourself less relevant for your user base. Compare with Docker Inc. and Elastic NV. They had the misfortune of doing this at the same time as Python was edging out Ruby's mindshare, also visible in the slow shift from Rails to Django over the decade, thereby doubling down on the road to slow irrelevancy. This is all pretty unfortunate since the sysadmin tooling in the cloud native era leaves a lot to be desired, but it is what it is.

heleninboodler 5y ago

Places that run tens or hundreds of thousands of machines generally really need something managing the mutable space between the base image and the container to make sure things get updated more or less continuously for security patches, user access, etc. This space gets a lot thinner with containers, but doesn't disappear completely, in my experience. This is where something like Puppet comes in. I know there's the immutable infra movement, but I don't know how practical it really is to shoot every single server in the head and recycle it when a critical vulnerability comes out. Maybe others have seen this, but I haven't.