I was looking into doing something similar with Nomad recently since lately I have been using systemd to launch containers and managing that config with some janky shell scripts. How are you configuring everything to run on a single server, including consul? Isn't Nomad designed to to run on multiple servers or are you running nomad in multiple containers on your VPS? When I looked into this previously I got to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56112422/nomad-configura... which has some suggestions for running Nomad on a single node but generally recommends against it.
Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
11–20 of 90 posts
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#12As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…
I'm not the biggest fan of Terraform either but it would be naive to deny that Terraform doesn't still offer a lot of advantages over CloudFormation even if you're not writing cloud agnostic code (even though I do actually agree with your point that Terraform doesn't make your infra cloud agnostic).
Terraform offers far more constructs than CloudFormation and there is still a lot to be said for using the same language from describing your AWS infra as GCP, Github, any on prem infra, etc (even if the resources differ between providers requiring bespoke code for each). It's a bit like those who advocate node.js because it means the same developers can right frontend and backend code and in the same language.
If you like the tooling around CloudFormation in AWS then you're better off with serverless (`sls`) or even Amazon's own CDK (https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/) over YAML-based CloudFormation stacks in my opinion.
That's not to say I don't think Terraform doesn't have its warts: properties are non-guessable, IDE integration is pretty mediocre, and it's overly verbose in calling modules (so bad that sometimes the calling code has just as many lines as the module itself!) but I do still think it is the least worst tool available at the moment. And one can always use a 3rd party tools like Terragrunt if you want to fix some of the shortcomings of Terraform while still taking advantage of it's benefits (though personally I'm on the fence about whether the industry really needs yet another transpiler that compiles to code that needs to be transpiled....it's starting to feel like it's just abstractions all the way down....)
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it varies on the quality of the providers, at least in AWS I've yet to come across something missing
But why not just Cloudformation then? What advantage does Terraform provide over Cloudformation in your opinion?
For one, it's closer to a proper programming language as opposed to straight up data interchange format. Sure if you write it in YAML than you can take advantage of variables but YAML's syntax for variables is pretty gross.
Comparing CloudFormation to Terraform is a little like comparing HTML and CSS to Javascript (though Terraform isn't nearly as nice to code in as Javascript -- and I'm not exactly a big fan of Javascript). You can cover most use cases with plain HTML and CSS but the moment you need to get a little more intelligent with your code you get stuck.
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#14I had many of the same needs, so I wrote Harbormaster:
https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster
All it does is manage Compose applications, with a sane directory structure. It's been working great, both for my personal use and for a few companies running production workloads on it.
I love that it's super simple and the workflow it has is fantastic, I just push to a repo and everything else happens automatically.
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why not just Cloudformation then? What advantage does Terraform provide over Cloudformation in your opinion?
For one, it's closer to a proper programming language as opposed to straight up data interchange format. Sure if you write it in YAML than you can take advantage of variables but YAML's syntax for variables is pretty gross. Comparing CloudFormation to Terraform is a little like comparing HTML and CSS to Javascript (though Terraform isn't nearly as nice to code in as Javascript -- and I'm not exactly a big fan of Java…
> For one, it's closer to a proper programming language as opposed to straight up data interchange format. Sure if you write it in YAML than you can take advantage of variables but YAML's syntax for variables is pretty gross.
I think that's what AWS CDK[0] and Terraform's CDKTF[1] are trying to solve.
Given the context of your example, I'd liken Terraform to CSS and CloudFormation to HTML; CDK/TF to Javascript. It's not a great analogy, but Terraform as is right now is just close enough to a programming language to deceive you into treating it like one. But it really isn't and those issues become glaringly clear the more you use it.
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#16the qemu driver for nomad seems pretty bare bones compared to kubevirt
https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/qemu
https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/virtual_machines/disks_and_vo...
Is terraform generally used to deploy workloads to nomad instead of writing tasks directly?
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
For one, it's closer to a proper programming language as opposed to straight up data interchange format. Sure if you write it in YAML than you can take advantage of variables but YAML's syntax for variables is pretty gross. Comparing CloudFormation to Terraform is a little like comparing HTML and CSS to Javascript (though Terraform isn't nearly as nice to code in as Javascript -- and I'm not exactly a big fan of Java…
> For one, it's closer to a proper programming language as opposed to straight up data interchange format. Sure if you write it in YAML than you can take advantage of variables but YAML's syntax for variables is pretty gross. I think that's what AWS CDK[0] and Terraform's CDKTF[1] are trying to solve. Given the context of your example, I'd liken Terraform to CSS and CloudFormation to HTML; CDK/TF to Javascript. It's…
Newer versions of Terraform are much better. I think they went v1.0 at the right time. But I do agree that there are still plenty of warts in TF compared to a "proper" programming language. However TF 1.0 is still easily far more composable than CSS currently is. If anything, YAML (and thus CloudFromation) is more equivalent to CSS than TF is given YAML's support in the spec for variables, templates, etc.
I'm yet to try Hashicorps CDKTF but from what I've used of CDK it felt like the audience was a little different to those that would use TF. CDK feels more for orgs that would have the same team who write the application code (eg lambdas) also write the infra, a bit like Serverless (sls) is. Whereas Terraform tends to be more suited for orgs that like different teams managing infra from those managing application development. Generally speaking of course.
Ultimately all the above tools work fine for production systems so its often just a question of preference.
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#18I was looking into doing something similar with Nomad recently since lately I have been using systemd to launch containers and managing that config with some janky shell scripts. How are you configuring everything to run on a single server, including consul? Isn't Nomad designed to to run on multiple servers or are you running nomad in multiple containers on your VPS? When I looked into this previously I got to https…
For development purposes you very much can run Nomad and Consul on a single host. They recommend you don't, as you lose any HA, of course, but for those of us not seeking 5 nines of availability, that's quite acceptable.
In my lab I'm actually running a two-node cluster, but that's 'even worse' and engenders the occasional mildly surprising failure states.
Anyway, I can highly recommend setting up Nomad (and some friends) on a single host. It's going to be much more robust & interesting than 'some janky shell scripts'. : )
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#19As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…
What do people here think about Pulumi?
Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why not just Cloudformation then? What advantage does Terraform provide over Cloudformation in your opinion?
For one, it's closer to a proper programming language as opposed to straight up data interchange format. Sure if you write it in YAML than you can take advantage of variables but YAML's syntax for variables is pretty gross. Comparing CloudFormation to Terraform is a little like comparing HTML and CSS to Javascript (though Terraform isn't nearly as nice to code in as Javascript -- and I'm not exactly a big fan of Java…
Out of interest, do you find yourself writing actual software with CDK stacks integrated, or is it more accurate to say the CDK is just a stand-alone bit of code purely for deploying infrastructure?
I'm definitely in the latter camp, which is something I find frustrating. I get that for a developer the syntax familiarity might make CDK easier, but for me as a non-developer the pain of groping around the terrible documentation and learning how classes are supposed to be used far outweighs the annoyance of fixing YAML indentation.
Ultimately I worry people are jumping on the "true IaC" bandwagon without acknowledging that if their infrastructure is supposed to be somewhat static and immutable, a declarative language might actually be better.