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All of this IAC crap was sold to barely-tech-literate engineering managers as “declarative makes the complexity go away!” so every IAC vendor wed themselves to

All of this IAC crap was sold to barely-tech-literate engineering managers as “declarative makes the complexity go away!” so every IAC vendor wed themselves to YAML or HCL or JSON, but of course the complexity doesn’t go away and so the vendors came up with increasingly absurd ways to DRY up this YAML (text templates a la Helm or encoding a DSL into your config language a la Terraform and CloudFormation). Eventually people realized this was madness and what’s really needed is a programming language that can resolve to these static manifests, so these vendors in their zeal to forever misunderstand the assignment came out with CDKs so we can compile source code to YAML with a whole bunch of pointless inheritance to really make a mess of things.

datalopers 5y ago
It’s okay they’ll all be unemployed by Christmas 2023 and we’ll look back on this tech boom with “maybe we should have solved business problems instead of spending all our time rewriting from one devops tooling to the next?”
- Jenk 5y ago
  That claim is more absurd than those you mock.
  - datalopers 5y ago
    This tech bubble already popped a leak (Nov 2021) and is deflating rapidly. There’s enough runway to last another year or two. Down-rounds and lay-offs are coming fast. Companies with ample cash will be fine, of course, but all these spurious startups with egregious VC funding, overpaid Pulumi and Kubernetes and <insert all the other unnecessary tech> engineers will soon be out of work and unable to find similar employment comp. People who get shit done and can run lean profit driven businesses will continue to survive just fine.
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      We've been hearing the same exact thing since at least 2013. I remember when 2015 was going to be the next huge tech crash, but nothing happened.
      - baq 5y ago
        stop listening to cnbc, start looking at the numbers. shit's gone really bad really fast and it's only starting. first signs of weakness in LQD, HYG and JNK have been there since december and it's been straight down from there. stay aware.
      - datalopers 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble > Low interest rates in 1998–99 facilitated an increase in start-up companies > In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out of business after burning through their venture capital and failing to become profitable. Sound familiar? It should, because history rhymes.
        Jenk 5y ago
        What is utterly absurd is not the claim that capitalism has boom or bust, but that IAC is in any way related.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        bogomipz 5y ago
        How exactly does a Wikipedia entry for the 1999 dot com crash support your assertion that that a market crash is imminent? How is that any different than make posting a Wikipedia link for World War II as supporting evidence that World War 3 is imminent? At any rate it does not sound familiar. Nor does it look familiar. The world in 2022 looks very different compared to the world at the end of the last century. People have seemingly predicted 20 of the last 1 tech bubbles. The "Dot Com Bust 2.0" headline is practically a meme at this point. I feel like it's something lazy journalists do on slow news days. Here's a brief sampling from the last 8 years. From 2014 - "In Some Ways, It’s Looking Like 1999 in the Stock Market"[1] From 2016 - "This Tech Bubble Is Bursting"[2] From 2018 - "Silicon Valley tech bubble is larger than it was in 2000, and the end is coming" [3] From 2020 - "6 Reasons This Tech Bubble Is Bursting"[4] Ad infinitum. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/business/in-some-ways-its-looking-like-1999-in-the-stock-market.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/business/in-some-ways-its... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-tech-bubble-is-bursting-1462161662 https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-tech-bubble-is-bursting-14... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/tech-bubble-is-larger-than-in-2000-and-the-end-is-coming.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/tech-bubble-is-larger-than-i... [4] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/10/6-reasons-this-tech-bubble-is-bursting/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/10/6-reasons-this-tec...
bogomipz 5y ago
I'd be curious to hear what you see as a better alternative to all of this "IAC crap." Also how many IAC vendors are there really? Hashicorp, Pulumi and AWS? What are the others? As I recall before cloud era infrastructure on any kind scale was still code, its just that the code was maintaining thousands of lines of Kickstart of FAI configs and associated preinstall and postinstall shell scripts. I don't remember that being any more pleasant to maintain.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  “vendors” was probably the wrong word, but Helm is in effectively the same camp. I gave my solution in the comments, and it’s not Kickstart or FAI.
klysm 5y ago
Would you rather manually manage things through a UI? It’s not like IAC doesn’t solve problems. Sure it introduces some and isn’t optimal but I’m curious to hear your solution.
- fivre 5y ago
  No. IAC absolutely absolutely solves problems (repeatability and a source of truth you can put in source control, among others) that GUI management has no good solution for. What OP is getting at is that IAC is often not /sold/ this way, it's sold as way to make managing complex systems simpler, in the sense that someone with less expertise can use it effectively, because marketers and salespeople love promising something that will remove all that pesky setup work and let you start on whatever it is you actually want to do. This can be true for some tools (e.g. I don't have a great deal of knowledge about compiler internals or assembly, but my compiled code still does what I wrote it to do), but not necessarily all. Managing an AWS environment is an inherently complex task, and IAC tools can't reduce that complexity without being prescriptive. We may in the distant future get to the point where prescriptive configuration is fine (I trust that my compiler will make better assembly optimization decisions than I ever will), but we're not there now. What we have now addresses UX issues with using GUIs for these tasks.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I gave you my solution. Write typescript or Go or whatever that emits the static configs that describe the desired state of the world and then feed those into the IAC engine which will diff them against the actual state of the world and make the requisite changes. It’s still “iac”, it’s just simpler.
  - klysm 4y ago
    So.... pulumi? That sounds a whole lot like how Terraform, Pulumi and kubernetes work. But you just want to roll it yourself?

datalopers 5y ago

It’s okay they’ll all be unemployed by Christmas 2023 and we’ll look back on this tech boom with “maybe we should have solved business problems instead of spending all our time rewriting from one devops tooling to the next?”

Jenk 5y ago
That claim is more absurd than those you mock.
- datalopers 5y ago
  This tech bubble already popped a leak (Nov 2021) and is deflating rapidly. There’s enough runway to last another year or two. Down-rounds and lay-offs are coming fast. Companies with ample cash will be fine, of course, but all these spurious startups with egregious VC funding, overpaid Pulumi and Kubernetes and <insert all the other unnecessary tech> engineers will soon be out of work and unable to find similar employment comp. People who get shit done and can run lean profit driven businesses will continue to survive just fine.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    We've been hearing the same exact thing since at least 2013. I remember when 2015 was going to be the next huge tech crash, but nothing happened.
    - baq 5y ago
      stop listening to cnbc, start looking at the numbers. shit's gone really bad really fast and it's only starting. first signs of weakness in LQD, HYG and JNK have been there since december and it's been straight down from there. stay aware.
    - datalopers 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble > Low interest rates in 1998–99 facilitated an increase in start-up companies > In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out of business after burning through their venture capital and failing to become profitable. Sound familiar? It should, because history rhymes.
      - Jenk 5y ago
        What is utterly absurd is not the claim that capitalism has boom or bust, but that IAC is in any way related.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - bogomipz 5y ago
        How exactly does a Wikipedia entry for the 1999 dot com crash support your assertion that that a market crash is imminent? How is that any different than make posting a Wikipedia link for World War II as supporting evidence that World War 3 is imminent? At any rate it does not sound familiar. Nor does it look familiar. The world in 2022 looks very different compared to the world at the end of the last century. People have seemingly predicted 20 of the last 1 tech bubbles. The "Dot Com Bust 2.0" headline is practically a meme at this point. I feel like it's something lazy journalists do on slow news days. Here's a brief sampling from the last 8 years. From 2014 - "In Some Ways, It’s Looking Like 1999 in the Stock Market"[1] From 2016 - "This Tech Bubble Is Bursting"[2] From 2018 - "Silicon Valley tech bubble is larger than it was in 2000, and the end is coming" [3] From 2020 - "6 Reasons This Tech Bubble Is Bursting"[4] Ad infinitum. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/business/in-some-ways-its-looking-like-1999-in-the-stock-market.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/business/in-some-ways-its... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-tech-bubble-is-bursting-1462161662 https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-tech-bubble-is-bursting-14... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/tech-bubble-is-larger-than-in-2000-and-the-end-is-coming.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/tech-bubble-is-larger-than-i... [4] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/10/6-reasons-this-tech-bubble-is-bursting/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/10/6-reasons-this-tec...

bogomipz 5y ago

I'd be curious to hear what you see as a better alternative to all of this "IAC crap." Also how many IAC vendors are there really? Hashicorp, Pulumi and AWS? What are the others? As I recall before cloud era infrastructure on any kind scale was still code, its just that the code was maintaining thousands of lines of Kickstart of FAI configs and associated preinstall and postinstall shell scripts. I don't remember that being any more pleasant to maintain.

throwaway894345 5y ago
“vendors” was probably the wrong word, but Helm is in effectively the same camp. I gave my solution in the comments, and it’s not Kickstart or FAI.

klysm 5y ago

Would you rather manually manage things through a UI? It’s not like IAC doesn’t solve problems. Sure it introduces some and isn’t optimal but I’m curious to hear your solution.

fivre 5y ago
No. IAC absolutely absolutely solves problems (repeatability and a source of truth you can put in source control, among others) that GUI management has no good solution for. What OP is getting at is that IAC is often not /sold/ this way, it's sold as way to make managing complex systems simpler, in the sense that someone with less expertise can use it effectively, because marketers and salespeople love promising something that will remove all that pesky setup work and let you start on whatever it is you actually want to do. This can be true for some tools (e.g. I don't have a great deal of knowledge about compiler internals or assembly, but my compiled code still does what I wrote it to do), but not necessarily all. Managing an AWS environment is an inherently complex task, and IAC tools can't reduce that complexity without being prescriptive. We may in the distant future get to the point where prescriptive configuration is fine (I trust that my compiler will make better assembly optimization decisions than I ever will), but we're not there now. What we have now addresses UX issues with using GUIs for these tasks.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I gave you my solution. Write typescript or Go or whatever that emits the static configs that describe the desired state of the world and then feed those into the IAC engine which will diff them against the actual state of the world and make the requisite changes. It’s still “iac”, it’s just simpler.
- klysm 4y ago
  So.... pulumi? That sounds a whole lot like how Terraform, Pulumi and kubernetes work. But you just want to roll it yourself?