21–30 of 102 posts
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…
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"
Ultimately, Otto was trying to be a masterless PaaS (Heroku, etc.). When you frame it that way and think about all the things you'll have to solve it becomes challenging. On top of that, we always wanted Otto itself to be fairly "thin" and delegate its difficult duties to the rest of the stack. This required us to build a bunch of features we weren't ready to build into our other products OR risk bloating Otto itself.
Overall, it was too early for us to do.
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 will continue using Consul (it's DNS interface for service discovery is awesome) and Vault, but most everything else seems like it's a bit too ambitious and ultimately lacking.
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…
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…
Everyone has a different experience and perception I suppose.
I agree we have a long way to go, but I disagree that our tooling is "very incomplete" OR "un-battle-tested".
Ignoring Vagrant as you did, Consul is used at multi-thousand node (per datacenter) scale by dozens of companies and a couple specific companies are using it at an even larger scale. And that's ignoring the thousands of hobbyist and smaller company usage at dozen to hundred node scale. I only don't mention specific names because I don't have explicit permission, but you'll just have to trust I don't intend to lie here.
Vault as another example: if you interacted with a financial institution, your transaction at some point likely hit a Vault cluster. Did you visit some websites today? One of the world's largest CDNs has fully deployed Vault for internal TLS cert management.
Those are just a couple examples.
Or, ignoring tech usage completely, we just had our first seven-figure quarter after only three quarters of sales (and that was dozens of deals, not just a handful). You just can't get those sorts of numbers without real world usage.
On completeness, I think the adoption speaks for itself. Tools don't get adopted at the scale they're being adopted without being complete enough to productively solve a real pain point. I believe we have a long way to go but what we have already in most of our tools is relatively complete by measure of being able to get real, meaningful, and productive work done.
Its unfortunate that we can't get to every open source issue and resolve every problem for everyone, but please try to understand that the issue inbound across our projects is massive in addition to trying to build enterprise solutions for customers and run a business. We'd love to hire hire hire to handle all the community inbound but that'd be irresponsible of us financially. Our teams are slowly growing and we're also promoting more and more community members to core committers who help out quite a bit, too. Packer has ups and downs since we don't have a full team around it at the moment but its on our radar of things to work on.
Ultimately, we can improve in every area and we'll strive to do so. In the process, we're motivated and encouraged by our community and also by the "serious work" we see our tools doing every day across various industries.
I'll follow up with you via email to see where we've fallen short for you. I find these criticisms educational and would like to see where we went wrong. I'm not doing that to hide anything from the public, but only because its hard to have meaningful back-and-forth discourse in a few nesting levels of comments. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've also seen tfstate get weird after a slow Elasticache spin up or termination. If it takes over 10 minutes it times out. The main thing I don't like about Terraform is that they don't support conditionals, which can be annoying.
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…
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…
My experience.
Windows guests: buggy
FreeBSD guests: buggy
Ansible provisioning: buggy
Windows support was incorporated from a community plugin. Now it's in limbo maintained neither by the original creators nor the (seemingly) lone dev from hashicorp assigned to vagrant.
They use DRM to protect their closed source proprietary plugins and it makes it a nightmare to build a version from source that works with said plugins. Building the installer is closed source for some reason.
After finally being able to run with modified source, I was able to monkey patch their paid VMWare plugin to add a capability so I could use private_network with static IP on Windows guests . I posted the monkey patch to github issues and it took two weeks for their paid plugin to be updated.
I wanted to love and contribute to vagrant, but the somewhat dishonest docs, unresponsive dev team, and DRM have turned me into a grudging user only because there are no alternatives.
Vagrant is definitely a wolf in sheepskin in terms of appearing open source and open to community collaboration.
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…
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…