Decommissioning Otto

#1

Post by zhenjl » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 12:20 AM UTC

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#2

Post by _bpo » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:13 AM UTC

It's too bad (and uncharacteristic of mitchellh) that this post is so light on specifics. Were the "previously unknown challenges" simply that not enough people adopted Otto? Or were there actual technical hurdles?

The premise of Otto isn't clearly flawed, so it would be interesting to see specific challenges - even if it's just "the problem space is way too big and not enough people wanted it"

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#3

Post by dkarapetyan » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:22 AM UTC

_bpo wrote: post #2

It's too bad (and uncharacteristic of mitchellh) that this post is so light on specifics. Were the "previously unknown challenges" simply that not enough people adopted Otto? Or were there actual technical hurdles? The premise of Otto isn't clearly flawed, so it would be interesting to see specific challenges - even if it's just "the problem space is way too big and not enough people wanted it"

The selling point was you just do the bare minimum and otto figures out what other specific things you need to get your project up and running. That's not scope, that's magic.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#4

Post by _bpo » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:36 AM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #3

_bpo wrote: post #2

It's too bad (and uncharacteristic of mitchellh) that this post is so light on specifics. Were the "previously unknown challenges" simply that not enough people adopted Otto? Or were there actual technical hurdles? The premise of Otto isn't clearly flawed, so it would be interesting to see specific challenges - even if it's just "the problem space is way too big and not enough people wanted it"

The selling point was you just do the bare minimum and otto figures out what other specific things you need to get your project up and running. That's not scope, that's magic.

Lots of useful, successful things appear to be magic (especially in their selling points). Early Heroku is a great example in this space.

I didn't see anything in the initial premise of otto that was technically untenable. We could speculate about the "challenges" - the scope was too wide/unbounded, it was open source, it was a distraction from other company goals, it didn't gain enough early traction - but that's simply speculation without details from the creators.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#5

Post by ploxiln » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:41 AM UTC

    Otto, the successor to Vagrant
    772 points agonzalezro a year ago 177 comments (https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/otto.html)

Me at the time: Are you kidding?!

Me now: Oh, I even forgot about that, the world of software engineering isn't always insane after all, I should lighten up ...

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#6

Post by manojlds » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:50 AM UTC

Considering the "progress" they were making, and the very lofty goals, this was expected.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#7

Post by rdtsc » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:15 AM UTC

They did a good job at trying something, it didn't work as expected and they were honest and decided to focus on something else. Those are all very good qualities. I think that's commendable.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#8

Post by Mizza » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:18 AM UTC

Does anybody _actually_ use the HashiCorp stack, besides Vagrant, for serious work? I tried and honestly found their products sorely, sorely lacking. Very shiny documentation, very incomplete, un-battled-tested tools, no examples given, little response from their devs other than the PR team.

For a small example, I _still_ get +1 notifications on this critical issue nearly every day: https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues/409 - no response from dev team whatsoever.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#9

Post by morgante » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:28 AM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #8

Does anybody _actually_ use the HashiCorp stack, besides Vagrant, for serious work? I tried and honestly found their products sorely, sorely lacking. Very shiny documentation, very incomplete, un-battled-tested tools, no examples given, little response from their devs other than the PR team. For a small example, I _still_ get +1 notifications on this critical issue nearly every day: https://github.com/mitchellh/packe…

I use and love Terraform. Even for small projects, I find it a lot better for provisioning AWS resources than any of the alternatives.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#10

Post by Mizza » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:33 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #9

Mizza wrote: post #8

Does anybody _actually_ use the HashiCorp stack, besides Vagrant, for serious work? I tried and honestly found their products sorely, sorely lacking. Very shiny documentation, very incomplete, un-battled-tested tools, no examples given, little response from their devs other than the PR team. For a small example, I _still_ get +1 notifications on this critical issue nearly every day: https://github.com/mitchellh/packe…

I use and love Terraform. Even for small projects, I find it a lot better for provisioning AWS resources than any of the alternatives.

Have you tried Troposphere? I compared the two and found I liked Tropo much much more.