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I love the simplicity of this approach. In your setup, how do you track config and updates of your VMs?

clvx 2y ago
I like this but one of the issues with this approach is if no Docker images like traditional configuration management tool, you are going for a world of pain. Docker and Docker images have tons of best practices already defined for plenty of use cases. If it's already containerized; then, jumping to any orchestrator that supports OCI images is more about adjusting the business to a new set of operations.
mdaniel 2y ago
Like everything, it's context dependent, but wowzers my life has improved so much since I got on board the Flatcar or Bottlerocket train of immutable OS. Flatcar (née CoreOS) does ship with docker but is still mostly a general purpose OS but Bottlerocket is about as "cloud native" as it comes, shipping with kubelet and even the host processes run in containers. For my purposes (being a k8s fanboy) that's just perfect since it's one less bootstrapping step I need to take on my own Both are Apache 2 and the Flatcar folks are excellent to work with https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar#readme https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar#readme https://github.com/bottlerocket-os#bottlerocket https://github.com/bottlerocket-os#bottlerocket
- thebeardisred 2y ago
  As usual, I'm stoked to see I'm not the only one using Flatcar. :)
- mattbillenstein 2y ago
  Sure, but again, complexity - stuff people have to learn/maintain/upgrade, etc. ymmv Running and configuring VMs isn't hard to do correctly, it just takes discipline to never "hack it in the moment" - or if you do, can that change in your config system.
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    > it just takes discipline to never "hack it in the moment" - or if you do, can that change in your config system. Yup, and I'm glad your experience has been different from mine but mine has been that tired and stressed people are anything but disciplined, so nipping a few "I'll just apt-get ..." in the bud goes a long way. So does Reverse Uptime (or its friend, Chaos Engineering)
mattbillenstein 2y ago
I have a custom deployment system which idempotently configures an Ubuntu LTS VM. All the config templates are checked into source control. I don't configure anything by hand - it's either handled in this thing or via a small user-data script run at provisioning time.

clvx 2y ago

I like this but one of the issues with this approach is if no Docker images like traditional configuration management tool, you are going for a world of pain. Docker and Docker images have tons of best practices already defined for plenty of use cases. If it's already containerized; then, jumping to any orchestrator that supports OCI images is more about adjusting the business to a new set of operations.

mdaniel 2y ago

Like everything, it's context dependent, but wowzers my life has improved so much since I got on board the Flatcar or Bottlerocket train of immutable OS. Flatcar (née CoreOS) does ship with docker but is still mostly a general purpose OS but Bottlerocket is about as "cloud native" as it comes, shipping with kubelet and even the host processes run in containers. For my purposes (being a k8s fanboy) that's just perfect since it's one less bootstrapping step I need to take on my own Both are Apache 2 and the Flatcar folks are excellent to work with https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar#readme https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar#readme https://github.com/bottlerocket-os#bottlerocket https://github.com/bottlerocket-os#bottlerocket

thebeardisred 2y ago
As usual, I'm stoked to see I'm not the only one using Flatcar. :)
mattbillenstein 2y ago
Sure, but again, complexity - stuff people have to learn/maintain/upgrade, etc. ymmv Running and configuring VMs isn't hard to do correctly, it just takes discipline to never "hack it in the moment" - or if you do, can that change in your config system.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  > it just takes discipline to never "hack it in the moment" - or if you do, can that change in your config system. Yup, and I'm glad your experience has been different from mine but mine has been that tired and stressed people are anything but disciplined, so nipping a few "I'll just apt-get ..." in the bud goes a long way. So does Reverse Uptime (or its friend, Chaos Engineering)

mattbillenstein 2y ago

I have a custom deployment system which idempotently configures an Ubuntu LTS VM. All the config templates are checked into source control. I don't configure anything by hand - it's either handled in this thing or via a small user-data script run at provisioning time.