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System Initiative has open sourced its collab DevOps tool
- kitanata 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoYou've posted over 150 of these comments in the last 24 hours. That's abusive, and I've banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- viraptor 3y agoThere seems to be a way you could quickly solve this problem... can't quite put my finger on it, but there may be a hint in that person's comment.
- dang 3y agoI think you're misassessing the problem.
- viraptor 3y agoNah, I'm with them and believe HN should allow account and comments deletion. If not, kitanata should be allowed to forever spam every submission.
- jacquesm 3y agoIf you really believe that then maybe you should stop commenting on HN because I'm not looking forward to the time when you decide to want to take your marbles home and you too start spamming every submission because you don't get your way. You can't go on contributing in that setting.
- 1xb3l 3y ago[dead]
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoThey were off-topic, but they do have a point.
- dredmorbius 3y agoCan I delete my account? We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799>. <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>
- zen928 3y agoand when you architect managing user privacy as a drawn-out process that won't even begin until another human responds in a completely manual engagement, i can immediately see the motivation of the above poster wanting administration to provide an answer without the response time being calculated in business days. completely fair game to shortcut an outdated hostile process with your own hostility, not really an unexpected result (e.g.: web scraping VS using an inaccessible API). it's an unacceptable approach in a modern context.
- dredmorbius 3y agoHN moderator email response is typically within a few hours, days at the outside. The process is not, by any reasonable interpretation, "drawn out".
- kitanata 3y ago[flagged]
- dredmorbius 3y ago
- mdwalters 3y ago> Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. Their account was made in 2011... Did they just create it back then, and come back to it now to spam?
- dang 3y agoGood catch. I'll delete that sentence. No, I say that when the account appears to have been created for that purpose, or if there's reason to believe that the same user is creating multiple accounts to abuse HN. I might have just gotten this wrong in this case. Thanks!
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoI read their website, their Github project page, and still have no idea what it is (but I know how to install it!). I started to read their blog post but it's too long and while they claim this tool is useful for DevOps, I couldn't find any info on how it accomplishes that.
- btobolaski 3y agoThe website seems to have more information https://www.systeminit.com/ https://www.systeminit.com/ the video is enlighting. I'm unconvinced by their product though, I'm not sure that this is a good approach.
- VectorLock 3y agoI was interested in the concept but after looking at the source code and the architecture I think I agree with the "not sure that this is a good approach" conclusion.
- holoway 3y agoHey - CEO here. Happy to answer questions if y'all have any.
- VectorLock 3y agoWas this something you had planned to announce prior to the whole Terraform kerfuffle and it is just unfortunate timing, or was this precipitated by that event in any way?
- holoway 3y agoWe've been planning to open source it this way for the better part of a year. It just so happened that we were ready to open it up right after the Hashicorp folks made their decision. No intentional timing. You can see more on our approach here: https://www.systeminit.com/open-source/ https://www.systeminit.com/open-source/
- mdaniel 3y agoApologies if this comes across as "gift horse mouth"-y but https://github.com/systeminit/si#local-development-setup https://github.com/systeminit/si#local-development-setup and its https://github.com/systeminit/si/blob/main/docs/DEVELOPMENT_ENVIRONMENT.md https://github.com/systeminit/si/blob/main/docs/DEVELOPMENT_... friend are some wowzers for just tire kicking the thing. Is there any interest or intention to offer a docker-compose.yml for a little less "I want to spend an entire day just to see this run?"
- holoway 3y agoYep. If you go to https://systeminit.com https://systeminit.com and click "Sign up", you can use our launcher to run a build directly.
- lijok 3y agoSo, so many questions. Let me preface this by saying - if this works well enough to give devs confidence in the tool, this could be revolutionary. It would combine implementation, documentation, visuals and deployment into a single view simple enough for everyday devs to grok. I couldn't find any documentation - if there is, that answers these questions, please link me to them. 1. How does authentication work? Is it handled by the tool? 2. Can it support non-AWS resources, such as Grafana? 3. How does version control work? Can you review changes, roll back, etc? 4. In the demo on the main site, the security group was not attached to any VPC, what's going on there? 5. Does this remain maintainable when dealing with very large configurations, for example, a multi-account AWS setup with tens of thousands of resources. If so, what mechanisms are available in this tool to facilitate this maintainability? Thank you
- c7DJTLrn 3y agoIt looks cool, but I would be hesitant to leave IaC behind. DevOps/sysadmin kind of people are infamous for (generally) not liking GUIs for a reason. We like being able to grep through a repo, revert to older versions of the code, and deploy new infra all through the CLI. It might be adopted by people who already do ClickOps or aren't comfortable with the CLI, but I'm not sure about the rest of us. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
- hiepph 3y agoI heard in a Podcast that they are inspired by game development workflow (e.g. Unity) where multiple teams can work together in a unified way. This reduces "niche" power like CLI commands that only some of sysadmins can wield. Personally, as an infrastructure engineer, I still prefer CLI and everything as (text) code. But I'm open to change if this "second wave" could take off.
- maccard 3y agoAs someone who works on games professionally, the first thing people do is turn on the text support for unity assets. Unreal still uses binary assets and it's a giant pain in the ass. The problem isn't that everything should be text, it's that there are no tools out there that work with other content types. Semantic diff tools would be incredible honestly, and text is a poor representation of code. It's just the best we have right now
- jahsome 3y agoI tend to romanticize CLI as a universal and think of GUIs as niche, so it struck me odd to see CLIs referred to that way. That's not a character judgement. I'm actually curious what you mean by niche. Would you mind elaborating?
- holoway 3y agoSkepticism here is warranted - the history of things that look like this in our space isn't fantastic. We've put a lot of engineering into trying to create something that is a power tool, and flexible enough to solve hard real world problems. It's early, and we've got lots of work to do, but that's the goal.
- datahead 3y agoHi holoway, I've been following your project for a couple of months now. How do you compare yourselves to upbound/crossplane? IME crossplane has been a "much better terraform" and also borrows from some of tf's open source provider code. Seems to be one of the best IaC pattern for k8s centric shops. Pros: - adoption of k8s core engine, state mgmt - model everything as a CRD, consistent definition pattern both infra and app - open source - great UI when layered with argoCD - declarative Cons: - steep abstraction learning curve (for me anyway) - docs lacked key context for newbs (also getting way better, big efforts here) edit: formatting
- holoway 3y agoI think you hit the nail on the head with crossplane being a 'much better terraform' by design. Our goal isn't so much a better IaC / Declarative infrastructure tool - it's a better overall workflow for doing collaborative DevOps work. We think that by having an active model of your component, and tracking the resources along side, we can fix the feedback loops in a way that things like crossplane, terraform, or pulumi really can't. Of course today it's early - so you have to look at what we're building as a foundation for the future. But it's a solid foundation to build on!
- predictabl3 3y agoWait, I thought k8s and open shift had this entire service catalog concept that was basically sort of a CRD->IaaS bridge. Did that die? Is that not even what crossplane is? Once again, I'm 6 clicks deep and havent seen a single actionable example. I wish I could get inside some people's heads and wonder wtf theyre thinking when marketing this stuff. Edit. Wow OSB and Service Catalog are dead. Is there a obituary?
- mdaniel 3y ago> Once again, I'm 6 clicks deep and havent seen a single actionable example Based on the terse reply to my question, it seems they really want you to create an account and go through their onboarding tutorial after agreeing to an absolute telephone book sized ToS. Hell, it's possible I'm violating one of the paragraphs by even talking about the process. I appreciate that's likely not what you had in mind, but it seems to be what they have in mind
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoUsed identical tools before. It's just another vendor lock in monoculture. Doesn't matter that it's open source. The design is such that it's all or nothing. Same as Terraform.
- holoway 3y agoOne side effect of our design is that, once we bring more of the bi-directional capabilities back into the product - we can track the real-world resources as they change, and update the model on your behalf. So you can keep using (or start using) whatever tool you like to make the changes, and SI will do its best to help you rationalize that. We've had this working in earlier versions, and will again in the not too distant future.
- aae42 3y agoNone of the code that goes into the bi-directional capabilities will be open sourced though, will it?
- holoway 3y agoAbsolutely it will. Everything we write will be open sourced. All of it.
- aae42 3y ago> Absolutely it will. Everything we write will be open sourced. All of it. I'm impressed. My understanding of the setup was that this would be typescript code that would live in the database (could have definitely got that wrong, though). That signaled to me that this was going to be "company data" and proprietary.
- mathfailure 3y agoThe interface looks sexy. The binding to paid services instead of binding to APIs of open source systems makes me just sigh and go on with my life without System Initiative.
- millerhooks 3y agoI got through the first half of the tutorial. I have a busy week but I was excited to see this. It’s right in line with tool I’ve been trying to cobble with distracted effort for nearly a decade. I am so excited to continue to use this tool. Y’all nailed it.