Otto, the successor to Vagrant • Hacker News Board

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#131

Post by kbenson » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:19 PM UTC

dlandis wrote: post #122

I use Vagrant regularly for development work and it is a good tool, however, it does still have a lot of issues. I have also gotten the sense over the years that HashiCorp developers could have been more responsive to users and addressed more of the issues that mattered most to the user base. And now, with a new, complex, and broad product introduced...I just don't have a lot of confidence that the quality is going t…

Maybe they thought the best path to a really outstanding, polished tool was to approach the problem slightly differently and Otto is their solution? If that's the case (I really have no idea), maybe rather than devoting too much time to fixing vagrant they decided to limit the time spent on that to further what they thought is a better overall solution?

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#132

Post by davexunit » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

acveilleux wrote: post #103

davexunit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JSON/YAML, possibly with support for templating like Ansible When you are writing templates for your configuration files, what you've wanted all along was a real programming language.

Yes and no, a lot of the ops folks I know peter out at pretty basic scripting and find a templating system easier.

So we should build our most essential tools to suit the lowest common denominator? A proper programming language would allow the people that can only do basic scripting to do that, whilst allowing more advanced users to extend the system further and take full advantage of all the language's features and libraries. When those more basic users got more accustomed to the system, there would be room for them to move up that they wouldn't have if they were stuck with a nasty string-based templating language.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#133

Post by mastazi » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:26 PM UTC

dlandis wrote: post #122

I use Vagrant regularly for development work and it is a good tool, however, it does still have a lot of issues. I have also gotten the sense over the years that HashiCorp developers could have been more responsive to users and addressed more of the issues that mattered most to the user base. And now, with a new, complex, and broad product introduced...I just don't have a lot of confidence that the quality is going t…

According to the blog post Otto is actually built on other tools including Vagrant (which provides the dev environments) and Terraform (which provides the infrastructure management), so I think they will keep actively developing Vagrant in the future.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#134

Post by andybak » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:31 PM UTC

akurtzhs wrote: post #82

So the supported environments are available at https://www.ottoproject.io/docs/apps/index.html , and they're Go, PHP, Node.JS, Ruby, and Docker. I hope Python gets added to that list as a first class environment in the future.

I thought the omission of Python to be... strange.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#135

Post by mastazi » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:34 PM UTC

thejerz wrote: post #101

justizin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This addresses a bigger picture that some folks have been (ab)using vagrant to accomplish and requesting features that belonged in a new project, rather than on top of vagrant.

Such as?

Such as provisioning and deployment I guess... I've seen those requests over and over.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#136

Post by jamesgeck0 » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:35 PM UTC

allanmacgregor wrote: post #125

Does this mean that development focus will shift from Vagrant to Otto? Is Otto mean to replace vagrant?

Maybe, eventually? But not right now.

https://ottoproject.io/intro/vagrant-successor.html

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#137

Post by andybak » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:35 PM UTC

krick wrote: post #84

I'm not sure if I find it astonishing or expected that somebody finds all that magic good enough to both build that tool and to be thrilled about somebody did. I, for one, find it absolutely unacceptable. The whole point of virtual containers is to have development environment closely resembling production one (not entirely possible, but better than nothing). Your promise that your tool gives me "best possible enviro…

Yes - one size doesn't fit all.

Yes - sometimes you need something very specific.

But, please - it sounds like you've just damned us to repeat the same low-level tasks again and again.

80% of websites ARE the same. If you're in the 20% (or 10% or 1%) then good luck to you. But for those of us deploying another typical webapp - I'd really like to draw on community knowledge. I never wanted to learn devops same way as I never want to learn cryptography, oAuth, SQL internals, how nginx works etc. I just want to use tools that solve these problems for me.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#138

Post by andybak » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:37 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #123

acveilleux wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no, a lot of the ops folks I know peter out at pretty basic scripting and find a templating system easier.

Actually I'd love to be able to drop down to Python in my ansible playbooks/configs but ansible modules are very different to yaml/template files for the effort.

I have some misgivings about Ansible's fundamental design choices. It's main claim to fame seems to be that it sucks less than Puppet and Chef.

I used to really enjoy using Fabric. I only ever tolerated Ansible. I wonder if building on Fabric might have resulted in a better devops tool than Ansible provides.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#139

Post by sanderson1 » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:57 PM UTC

I think HashiCorp did themselves somewhat of a disservice by presenting Otto as a "successor" to Vagrant. Vagrant is a great technology that solves complex problems. Otto uses Vagrant to solve a different set of problems.

Otto is designed to automate the provisioning of local dev environments and production environments. While some use Vagrant to solve this problem, it's typically an un-standardized, home-grown solution. Otto is an attempt to standardize and automate the process.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I've been working on a project for the last year-ish that solves the exact same problems: Easily provisioning and configuring local dev environments and finding consistent parity between dev and production environments. I'm interested to really dig in and see the differences between Otto and the project I've been working on, Nanobox. Would love some outside feedback so feel free to take a look: https://nanobox.io

But I digress. I think Otto is less a "successor" to Vagrant, and more of a natural offshoot that solves a different problem. I don't ever see it replacing Vagrant, especially since it uses Vagrant behind the scenes.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#140

Post by bgentry » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 12:09 AM UTC

Otto looks great, and is probably a substantial improvement over Vagrant.

My biggest concern is that it still relies on VirtualBox for local dev. VirtualBox is unreliable and slow, especially its file mounting driver.

I'd love to see this evolve to use a different virtualization solution, maybe something based on the OS X Hypervisor Framework (ala https://github.com/mist64/xhyve)