3 ms·

There have been some cool tools coming out of Hashicorp, but I haven't read any experiences with people using their "full stack". Does anybody want to give thei

There have been some cool tools coming out of Hashicorp, but I haven't read any experiences with people using their "full stack". Does anybody want to give their own anecdote or maybe have a link to related article?

throwaway8978 12y ago
They're not quite complete yet. I wish this was made more clear. Terraform has several bugs, some of them that will try and destroy perfectly good infrastructure for no reason (though it will warn you first). That said, their work is always good, it's just not complete yet, but it's branded as if it is.
tonglil 12y ago
- Vagrant is a given, wonderful. - Packer is for syncing VirtualBox, AWS AMIs, and what not for quick and stable starting points, also wonderful. - Consul is great for monitoring and running a services oriented architecture, haven't pushed it to its full potential though. - Serf: n/a, haven't tried yet. - Terraform: n/a. We are still using Ansible as the provisioner. Overall, good ecosystem, would recommend.
- jimmcslim 12y ago
  Consul is built on top of Serf (the protocol at least), so given you are already using Consul, Serf wouldn't add anything for you.
- Gigablah 12y ago
  We've been using Terraform extensively for our production deployment (a typical AWS setup with public/private subnets, load balancers, autoscaling groups, the works), and it works for the most part. There's still a hefty amount of bugs and many things will not function the way you expect, though usually you can work around them. Also the configuration language (HCL) is rough around the edges and the variable interpolation gotchas can be very frustrating.
- porker 12y ago
  > - Vagrant is a given, wonderful. It's really useful, but on my MBP I've found using it abysmally slow (VirtualBox backend, website code shared using NFS, DB and everything else stored in VirtualBox VM and not shared folders) - page load times taking upwards of 20s (sometimes even a minute) when running direct on my MBP would be under 0.3s. Never figured out the issue, in spite of extensive research and tweaking. Replace VirtualBox with VMWare Fusion? But without a trial available of the Vagrant addon, bit of an expensive gamble.
  - jesseendahl 12y ago
    Apparently syncing file changes between the VM and host via rsync leads to a lot better performance than using NFS. Worth a shot at least: https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-5-rsync.html https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-5-r... http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/nfs-rsync-and-shared-folder http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/nfs-rsync-a...
  - kcorbitt 12y ago
    I have the same Vagrant setup you do (nfs-shared app directory, everything else inside the vagrant box), and while I see overheads of 1.5-2x, I've never seen anything like the 60x overheads you're describing here. Something seems off in your configuration. Perhaps you're memory-limited and the vagrant box is thrashing your swap file every time you make a request?
  - steveax 12y ago
    My personal experience is that the VMware provider is much snappier - and more stable too. The provider is what, $80 US? Not sure I'd call that an expensive gamble b
  - tszming 12y ago
    try SMB instead of NFS
witten 12y ago
Haven't used their full stack, but their "support" leaves a lot to be desired.
- mitchellh 12y ago
  Our support has been strained and historically been slow, but for the past couple months, our average support time has dropped down to less than a day! We recognized the issue there and hopefully you'll have a much better experience from here on out. "Bad support" is not the company we want to be. Sorry for the poor experience you had.
  - throwaway8978 12y ago
    I got no response when asking about when a bug that was fixed in an upstream library might lead to a new binary being released. It'd at least be nice to hear "I have no idea, we're busy."

throwaway8978 12y ago

They're not quite complete yet. I wish this was made more clear. Terraform has several bugs, some of them that will try and destroy perfectly good infrastructure for no reason (though it will warn you first). That said, their work is always good, it's just not complete yet, but it's branded as if it is.

tonglil 12y ago

- Vagrant is a given, wonderful. - Packer is for syncing VirtualBox, AWS AMIs, and what not for quick and stable starting points, also wonderful. - Consul is great for monitoring and running a services oriented architecture, haven't pushed it to its full potential though. - Serf: n/a, haven't tried yet. - Terraform: n/a. We are still using Ansible as the provisioner. Overall, good ecosystem, would recommend.

jimmcslim 12y ago
Consul is built on top of Serf (the protocol at least), so given you are already using Consul, Serf wouldn't add anything for you.
Gigablah 12y ago
We've been using Terraform extensively for our production deployment (a typical AWS setup with public/private subnets, load balancers, autoscaling groups, the works), and it works for the most part. There's still a hefty amount of bugs and many things will not function the way you expect, though usually you can work around them. Also the configuration language (HCL) is rough around the edges and the variable interpolation gotchas can be very frustrating.
porker 12y ago
> - Vagrant is a given, wonderful. It's really useful, but on my MBP I've found using it abysmally slow (VirtualBox backend, website code shared using NFS, DB and everything else stored in VirtualBox VM and not shared folders) - page load times taking upwards of 20s (sometimes even a minute) when running direct on my MBP would be under 0.3s. Never figured out the issue, in spite of extensive research and tweaking. Replace VirtualBox with VMWare Fusion? But without a trial available of the Vagrant addon, bit of an expensive gamble.
- jesseendahl 12y ago
  Apparently syncing file changes between the VM and host via rsync leads to a lot better performance than using NFS. Worth a shot at least: https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-5-rsync.html https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-5-r... http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/nfs-rsync-and-shared-folder http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/nfs-rsync-a...
- kcorbitt 12y ago
  I have the same Vagrant setup you do (nfs-shared app directory, everything else inside the vagrant box), and while I see overheads of 1.5-2x, I've never seen anything like the 60x overheads you're describing here. Something seems off in your configuration. Perhaps you're memory-limited and the vagrant box is thrashing your swap file every time you make a request?
- steveax 12y ago
  My personal experience is that the VMware provider is much snappier - and more stable too. The provider is what, $80 US? Not sure I'd call that an expensive gamble b
- tszming 12y ago
  try SMB instead of NFS

witten 12y ago

Haven't used their full stack, but their "support" leaves a lot to be desired.

mitchellh 12y ago
Our support has been strained and historically been slow, but for the past couple months, our average support time has dropped down to less than a day! We recognized the issue there and hopefully you'll have a much better experience from here on out. "Bad support" is not the company we want to be. Sorry for the poor experience you had.
- throwaway8978 12y ago
  I got no response when asking about when a bug that was fixed in an upstream library might lead to a new binary being released. It'd at least be nice to hear "I have no idea, we're busy."