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Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

scalefactory.com

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Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#11

Post by chrisshroba »

pid-1 wrote: post #9

I've been doing IaC in AWS since terraform 0.11 (now added Azure and AWS CDK to the mix). Most cloud providers (and don't get me started with software platforms) support IaC as a complete afterthought. The day you decide to use IaC, you will have chosen to spend your days fighting against their APIs to make things nice and immutable. Moreover, most languages and tooling are rather immature. Things like secrets, testi…

Any pointers to what you use instead for managing those kinds of corner cases like things that modify themselves?

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#12

Post by rocqua »

drewcoo wrote: post #3

I am an IaC advocate. I see articles like this as a barrier to meaningful IaC adoption. > In the tech industry, we can be guilty of the same crime sometimes. Certain practices get ingrained into the profession to the point where we forget exactly why we did it in the first place. But in school he hadn't known why he did it in the first plave. And more often in tech I see cargo cult practices that people don't underst…

> It's also incredibly dangerous to say we should follow a practice because of how it "feels." Does it "feel stable" or "feel understandable" or "feel fast?" Who cares. Show me the value, don't try to give me the tingles!

I disagree. First of all, how something feels says something about people's intuition which is a decent indicator of reality. More importantly though, how something feels affects how (or even if) people will use it. A system which 'feels' wrong will be under-used and generally worked around. This makes it a bad system in the real world, regardless of 'how great it would be if everyone used it'. It's similar with vaccines. The fact that to many people a vaccine 'felt wrong' made the vaccine actually less effective at blocking the spread of corona.

The value of something depends very much on 'how it feels'.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#14

Post by SkipperCat »

Some folks seem to be taken back by the word "feel" in the title, but it rings true to me.

I work at a place with lots of super smart people. Almost everything is automated, but a lot of that automation breaks and you have to constantly get the creator involved to turn that "one little knob" to get it working for your job. That's fine for the creator because he/she knows exactly what to do when the problem occurs. However, if you're an internal customer trying to use that system, its infuriating.

If you're going to create IaC tooling for a team of 50 people, it needs to work without contacting the author. If not, you've just taken a 5 minute job and turned it into a 2 hour search for the bug event.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#15

Post by SirensOfTitan »

I don’t really think IaC is there yet, as someone who has used terraform (and now pulumi) in production for some time.

My biggest gripe is that the feedback loop is fairly slow: planning often predicts valid config that fails in deployment. It doesn’t help that the process of planning is really slow (see https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/8872 it can take minutes for pulumi to plan changes if using azblob backend) with little incentive for teams like pulumi to investigate or fix unless you use their cloud. I get that pulumi is in the business of promoting their own cloud, but there are few (if any im aware of) IaC solutions not intrinsically tied to for-profit SaaS because it’s incredibly labor intensive to build consistent interfaces to several constantly changing cloud providers.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#16

Post by hobo_mark »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #15

I don’t really think IaC is there yet, as someone who has used terraform (and now pulumi) in production for some time. My biggest gripe is that the feedback loop is fairly slow: planning often predicts valid config that fails in deployment. It doesn’t help that the process of planning is really slow (see https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/8872 it can take minutes for pulumi to plan changes if using azblob backen…

As someone starting with terraform literally this weekend, why did you move away?

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#17

Post by mitchbob »

pech0rin wrote: post #13

Why is the “how” cut off at the beginning of the article title. Makes it really confusing without it.

Removing "How" is one of those automatic edits to titles made by HN, and I think it's a bad idea, as it often changes the meaning. Fortunately, it's possible to for the submitter to click "edit" and change it back to the original.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#19

Post by mountainriver »

IaC is unfortunately the wrong abstraction for most use cases. People have become religious about it and it’s slowing down development.

I’ve been doing IaC since terraform and k8s came around. We initially all thought it was great, now I think we’re covering up these wonderful UIs for a much worse interface that takes significantly longer, and in many cases gives us very little.

What we will hopefully converge on is UIs that basically do the same things as IaC.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#20

Post by tobr »

pech0rin wrote: post #13

Why is the “how” cut off at the beginning of the article title. Makes it really confusing without it.

HN does this automatically when you submit a title starting with “How”. I guess it reduces the clickbaityness of certain types of titles, but fails in cases like these.

If it happens and you don’t like it you can edit the submission to add the word back.

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