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A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

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Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#51

Post by hnlmorg »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #50
gyulai wrote: post #42

Great use of metaphor to make a complex and subtle technical concept into a readily-understood one-liner.

"Cattle, not pets" is not a great analogy in the first place. Maybe I only talk to smaller farmers, but they definitely care if a cow dies. Maybe not as much as if the dog dies, but it's a sign something is seriously wrong with their operation.

Analogies aren’t meant to be literally equal. They’re just a convenient way of expressing a complex problem in a simpler way, which the cattle vs pets analogy does well.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#52

Post by actually_a_dog »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #50
gyulai wrote: post #42

Great use of metaphor to make a complex and subtle technical concept into a readily-understood one-liner.

"Cattle, not pets" is not a great analogy in the first place. Maybe I only talk to smaller farmers, but they definitely care if a cow dies. Maybe not as much as if the dog dies, but it's a sign something is seriously wrong with their operation.

You just said it: they care if a cow dies because something is wrong with their operation, not because they care about that particular animal per se (usually). That's the exact opposite of why someone cares when their dog dies.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#53

Post by kesor »

djrobstep wrote: post #48
lamontcg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I have 25 years of experience with configuration management, including over 10 years having lead the development of one of the major tools in the space, and I don't waste time doing configuration management on my laptop, I just back it up. You can go ahead and do configuration management of your laptop if that gives you enjoyment, but it is entirely over the top to say that is an "unhealthy attitude".

That is exactly the problem. It doesn’t give me enjoyment. But why shouldn’t it?

Everyone can go and waste their time in whichever way they like.

Some people like gardening, although they will never get to "sell produce" at the vegetables market. That doesn't mean gardening is bad, it just means they enjoy it and enjoy wasting their time doing gardening. Other people just go and buy vegetables at the supermarket that were grown at commercial farming.

Same with doing configuration management on your laptop, if you really want to enjoy it, go for it. For most people its a complete waste of time and a useless activity compared to the alternative, which is changing the few files you need changing by hand, and backing it up to solve the "lost my work" problem.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#54

Post by blowski »

throwamon wrote: post #8

I might just be biased by selective attention, but it seems like more and more of these are popping up lately. I feel like we will eventually recognize a variant of Greenspun's Tenth Rule as common wisdom: > Any sufficiently complicated build system or configuration management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Nix. (Although to be honest it might make more sen…

Perhaps the belt-tightening going at the moment has made people realise how much money they're wasting on Kubernetes et al.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#55

Post by pmontra »

lamontcg wrote: post #30

> The idea behind Pets is that Configuration Management of individual hosts shouldn’t be harder than administering the system by hand. Just administer it by hand and back it up.

It's about what I'm thinking to do with my Odroid running from a microSD card. dd the microsd to another one and swap it when it will inevitably fail, more sooner than later. The only problem is that I don't want to pull the card off and copy it periodically or after an apt update. I'm storing configs in git but restoring them is a tedious task. Maybe Pets can help me. Or rsnapshot as on my laptop.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#58

Post by pmoriarty »

whalesalad wrote: post #12
throwamon wrote: post #8

I might just be biased by selective attention, but it seems like more and more of these are popping up lately. I feel like we will eventually recognize a variant of Greenspun's Tenth Rule as common wisdom: > Any sufficiently complicated build system or configuration management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Nix. (Although to be honest it might make more sen…

was going to say the same thing - but for ansible. an inventory file is literally a static list of pets in its simplest form, and with some simple convention you could have a directory per-host with any playbooks required. plus you have docs, community modules, etc.

I came to Ansible from Puppet, buying in to the claims I'd heard about Ansible being so much simpler ("it uses YAML for its config, which is so much simpler than configuring Puppet").

Turns out that, like Puppet, Ansible seems to have been congealed rather than designed, and it's a mess of inconsistent spaghetti code.

All the other config management systems I've tried, from Salt to Chef have exactly the same problem.

I'd be thrilled to find a config management system that actually was simple and elegant.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#59

Post by literalAardvark »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #50
gyulai wrote: post #42

Great use of metaphor to make a complex and subtle technical concept into a readily-understood one-liner.

"Cattle, not pets" is not a great analogy in the first place. Maybe I only talk to smaller farmers, but they definitely care if a cow dies. Maybe not as much as if the dog dies, but it's a sign something is seriously wrong with their operation.

My grandparents wouldn't have given a single hoot over the dog dying. The cows though? Those were important.

Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle

#60

Post by erebeee »

Shameless plug but here how I manage my personal servers with K3s (kubernetes) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406938

I stopped using configuration management a while ago for my servers because they are too complex and fragile for a sporadic usage. My main issue is that you need to use them daily in order to keep them working and for you to keep muscle memory.

For a time I tried to restrict myself to only Debian package, but with the time I felt like it was too restrictive, and not enough flexible.

I also tried Nix and really liked it, but my main issue was me having to google every time I wanted to make a change due to config file/package being awful to write/remember.

Maybe you will take a different path, but for personal usage, configuration management is really a waste of time imho, the frequency at which you will touch files will be low, and your tool/setup will become outdated before you realize it. And nowaday everything run inside a container, so you will have to adapt your tool to manage docker/podman/docker-compose at some point

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