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Decommissioning Otto

hashicorp.com

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Re: Decommissioning Otto

#11

Post by omni »

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…

We use Serf for deploy triggering and lightweight messaging between our asynchronous processing nodes and it works perfectly day in and day out. Really like it, provides a great alternative to pub-sub for some use cases.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#12

Post by nixgeek »

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.

Seemingly every couple of days, someone on Twitter whom I follow will exclaim "Oh noes, Terraform did something bad".

Seems like a 'principle of least surprise' violation.

Is that something others have observed?

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#13

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#14

Post by jcoby »

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.

I really, really want to like Terraform. I tried it on a medium project by starting with and modifying the Segment stack. I ran into constant problems with it not being able to deal with errors and not being able to modify the stack in a way that would work. I ran into several situations where I would have to change names and labels just so it could work around itself while I was trying to iterate on the stack and bring it to a workable state.

To give you an idea of how many problems I had I currently have 4 different tfstate files from 4 days of testing. I had to go into AWS and manually delete resources because it couldn't recover from the errors it created.

One example: I was using the ECS option and changed the container source for a service. Seems easy enough and something that should work. Terraform wedged itself after applying the change so badly that I had to blow away the entire setup to get it reset to where it could even run `plan` without erroring.

Otto looked nice but it had fundamental, basic issues and it seems like nobody was actually working on it. I +1'd a bug with the PHP implementation where it didn't give you the option to change the web root and never got an update. This is something that every single decent PHP framework out there REQUIRES and wasn't supported. Otto PHP seemed like it was designed simply to work with Wordpress.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#15

Post by tapsboy »

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 work for a mid-sized media company and we use Vagrant & Packer to build all our infra. AWS CF Templates have been a big pain and we are evaluating Terraform as an alternative

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#16

Post by morgante »

nixgeek wrote: post #12
morgante wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seemingly every couple of days, someone on Twitter whom I follow will exclaim "Oh noes, Terraform did something bad". Seems like a 'principle of least surprise' violation. Is that something others have observed?

I've never run into that myself. I do always inspect the plan before applying, but fortunately Terraform makes that easy.

Personally, I prefer it to alternatives like Boto/Troposphere because it's fully declarative and not coupled to a single cloud.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#17

Post by morgante »

jcoby wrote: post #14
morgante wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really, really want to like Terraform. I tried it on a medium project by starting with and modifying the Segment stack. I ran into constant problems with it not being able to deal with errors and not being able to modify the stack in a way that would work. I ran into several situations where I would have to change names and labels just so it could work around itself while I was trying to iterate on the stack and br…

Have you considered starting your own stack from the ground up?

I definitely find it a lot easier to manage and reason about if I mostly avoid third-party Terraform modules. Out of probably a dozen different Terraform projects, I've never run into a situation which I needed to manually resolve. This includes both projects which I started myself and cases where I'm helping to improve/manage client deployments.

> I was using the ECS option and changed the container source for a service.

What do you mean by this? I've used ECS with Terraform extensively and never had a problem with updating the container/image which a service referenced.

That being said, I never used Otto. It definitely seems like they tried to bite off more than they could chew and I wasn't really interested in such high-level solutions.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#18

Post by lobster_johnson »

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…

We are evaluating Vault, which has a reputation for being a quality product (I believe).

Terraform is also popular.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#19

Post by nullcipher »

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…

We tried terraform and gave up. We do use vagrant a lot though. How does HashiCorp make money?

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#20

Post by jcoby »

morgante wrote: post #17
jcoby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really want to like Terraform. I tried it on a medium project by starting with and modifying the Segment stack. I ran into constant problems with it not being able to deal with errors and not being able to modify the stack in a way that would work. I ran into several situations where I would have to change names and labels just so it could work around itself while I was trying to iterate on the stack and br…

Have you considered starting your own stack from the ground up? I definitely find it a lot easier to manage and reason about if I mostly avoid third-party Terraform modules. Out of probably a dozen different Terraform projects, I've never run into a situation which I needed to manually resolve. This includes both projects which I started myself and cases where I'm helping to improve/manage client deployments. > I was…

> Have you considered starting your own stack from the ground up?

Yes. I'm actually in the middle of trying that now.

I want to set up a vpc, a few web servers (1-10) with an autoscaling policy behind the vpc along with a bastion server and a cron server, a code deploy setup to work with autoscaling, cloudwatch logging and monitoring, a load balancer, an elasticache instance, and an rds instance. I've been working on this off an on for months. If you or anyone else can point me in a direction to simplify this I'd be grateful.

The core of the problem I had with terraform (outside of the ECS issue) is that there is one AWS service that gets soft deleted. I can't remember what it is right now but it really threw tf for a loop. So I'd setup the stack, do some testing, decide to shut everything down for the day with a `terraform destroy` and the next day i couldn't resume because tf thinks the resource exists but aws doesn't think it does.

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