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> plus it's based on vagrant, which falls in to the class of IMHO misconstrued sysadmin-automation software I refer to as PFCTs (post-facto configuration tinker

• contingencies 13y ago
  There is a fallacy in here... Provisioners in Vagrant allow you to automatically install software, alter configurations, and more on the machine as part of the vagrant up process. This is useful since boxes typically aren't built perfectly for your use case. Of course, if you want to just use vagrant ssh and install the software by hand, that works. But by using the provisioning systems built-in to Vagrant, it automates the process so that it is repeatable. It's the last part of the final sentence. You can't prove something is repeatable if it's potentially accessing the internet, date and time logic, etc. Cloning an image is a lot more repeatable (and known quantity) than re-massaging one in to existence. I term the class of IMHO misdirected systems administration tools that attempt the latter PFCTs (post-facto configuration tinkerers). Vagrant is on the better end of these (at least it focuses on one-time instantiation versus constant modification). Other tools such as puppet could be construed as encouraging long term modification without a clean reference at all, thus potentially resulting in configuration drift. It seems clear to me that this class of tool grew somewhat organically from classical systems administration and is not the most rigorous of approaches in this era of cheap virtualization and instant cloud-based provisioning.