71–80 of 146 posts
What is the product offering of Progress? Quickly went through the website.. not sure, but it sounds more like smoke and mirrors..
I use Fiddler (for web proxy debug) and Kendo UI (for Angular project) a lot at work. I had no idea they had other products
What's a good alternative to Chef?
Investors aside, did anyone make money here?
Either way, I’m glad that they are continuing to exist. Chef was onto something with Habitat and (especially) InSpec.
While you could access the database via SQL that was very much the second class citizen; it's native 4GL was fully integrated, and long predated attempts like Linq to hide developers from SQL.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_La...
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My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked .
My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different. Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously. I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC) And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration ta…
[[muffled screaming]]
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From my viewpoint, Puppet's portfolio is comprised of mostly half-baked stuff. You have Puppet itself, which is decent, and then an almost Google-level of weird stuff. They keep announcing new products but so far nothing seems to be sticking and they're all ludicrously expensive IMHO. Meanwhile, their core technology is kind of a dead end. More and more people are looking to manage containers and other serverless typ…
Puppet is a great tool for managing containers, and so is Chef. There is nothing inherently good about YAML. There is less buzz around those tools now however, and people tend to gravitate to other tools which are easier to get started with. They may end up "silent heroes" (much like Ruby itself, I would say) or they may end up replaced by other tools. The concept of state as text in version control is a timeless con…
Eh. While I won't say that it can't be used, I will argue that it's not the best tool for the job. I wouldn't call it a "great tool" for that purpose, although I suppose that depends on your workflow. I prefer to take the approach that containers are immutable once built. If you want to change the container, fine- make your changes, build a new instance, hotswap the connections over, and bring down the old one. There's no need for any sort of config management in my eyes, at least not in the traditional sense.
Now, Puppet could be useful for things like managing the VMs that the containers are running on, but I would prefer those stay immutable too, and with containers, they easily can. I'm (sadly) very aware that not all enterprise software can fit in this model though. Enterprise always lags behind, but it will get there. Hell, even SAP is heavily exploring containers. It's only a matter of time.
Fwiw Progress is most notable as a provider of OpenEdge, a database/development hybrid that was interesting/infamous for its contrarian 4GL based approach. While you could access the database via SQL that was very much the second class citizen; it's native 4GL was fully integrated, and long predated attempts like Linq to hide developers from SQL. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_La...
Since it seems to be really hard to find this information, want to make a copy of the content of the second link ([1]):
> A New Corporate Sponsor for NativeScript
> Progress is proud to introduce nStudio as the new corporate sponsor of NativeScript. After fostering a robust open source developer community, Progress looks forward to what nStudio will bring to the NativeScript community and customers.
My 2 cents on Chef is that's it's long dead. The handful of people I know who used chef professionally all gave strong negative feedback about it and moved away to ansible. While I can't comment on the exact problems because I didn't use it personally, there was a recurring mentions of losing states, seemingly destroying systems and configurations instead of setting things up. People were adamant that moving away fro…
Ansible is/was straight forward to use and understand, very F/OSS, relatively easy to orchestrate (even without tower), and had a nice ecosystem. Ansible always won for me because it was simple, and had just enough (though I always felt that the roles/tasks analogy was kind of awkward) and was easy to hack. These things were mostly true about Chef, but outside of being "ansible, but ruby", I don't remember distinctly what made Chef worth doing other than if it was there before you got there.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC Salt was one of the first to start venturing into the infrastructure provisioning realm and ansible went there too relatively easily though it's somewhat obscure[0]. Ansible and Chef (and presumably puppet) were quick to follow/build similar tooling but we all know who won that race -- Terraform.
Funnily enough, Terraform is now making it's way back around to eat the post-deploy logic as well with it's provisioners[1]. Can't wait to see HCL grow into an even more grotesque monster.
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I use Fiddler (for web proxy debug) and Kendo UI (for Angular project) a lot at work. I had no idea they had other products
I didn’t know that Progress owns Fiddler. What an awesome tool!
It's confirmed then. Absolutely nobody wants to buy Puppet. Anyone know why that fell through?
In total over 12 years, Chef raised around 105M and puppet raised around 189M in funding.
They're both doing pretty bad in the end and are on a (steep?) downward trend. They'll never be a billion dollar business. They probably won't recoup their valuation. Chef sold out. Puppet tries to survive.
From my perspective Chef users were actively fleeing so I guess it was sold for scrap, puppet might be downward but maybe not as steep so maybe puppet is trying to continue to operate as a small medium company. Also Puppet might be a fairly harder sell because it has both a higher valuation and debt, doesn't look like a great buying opportunity.