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Atlas by Hashicorp

atlas.hashicorp.com

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Re: Atlas by Hashicorp

#11

Post by wallflower »

Great job, Hashicorp!

Exciting to see the shift from clunky, heavy-weight versioned Chef cookbooks/Puppet modules that attempt to prevent 'server drift' by walking the directed graph for all dependencies with server convergence to true service registries like Consul and build images.

Amazon CloudFormation is pretty clunky when it comes to updating user data in the CF stack template that is passed to the resources. Sometimes it even thinks you didn't update anything. Having the file-based template update itself via consul-template seems like a more sane approach.

I am curious how the 'Maintain' part of the autoscaling works given that Amazon AWS has pretty crude autoscaling mechanisms available if you use only what CloudWatch offers. Hoping that 'Maintain' can be given a set of inputs on server health/application responsiveness and decide whether to scale up or scale down.

Also, integration with some kind of historical/real-time cost engine would be a great feature to figure out future/past billing for cloud services.

Re: Atlas by Hashicorp

#12

Post by WestCoastJustin »

joesmo wrote: post #8

Vagrant has so many bugs in development (network issues, file syncing issues) that I switched to manually building my own VMs to save time . I would never use it or any tech built on top of it in development, let alone production.

I have been using Vagrant daily, for little over a year and a half, to create fairly complex muli-node lab environments, and have not had similar experiences. The thought of going back to manually doing this again is not a pleasant one! I guess there are a couple places you could look: the OS images you are using (if they are flakey then the entire chain breaks), your machine (SSD makes things go quickly), your vagrant install (try upgrading), your virtualization software (try upgrading), etc. If there are real bugs, then file them on the Vagrant github page [1], and hopefully we can all benefit from the fixes.

[1] https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues

Re: Atlas by Hashicorp

#14

Post by mitchellh »

eaurouge wrote: post #13

Any plans to support other providers, like DigitalOcean for instance?

Many, many more providers are along the way. The providers already exist in the open source so its just a matter of enabling them one at a time in Atlas. But we have some surprises planned for some of them as well. :)

Re: Atlas by Hashicorp

#17

Post by throwaway8978 »

mitchellh wrote: post #7
witten wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't used their full stack, but their "support" leaves a lot to be desired.

Our support has been strained and historically been slow, but for the past couple months, our average support time has dropped down to less than a day! We recognized the issue there and hopefully you'll have a much better experience from here on out. "Bad support" is not the company we want to be. Sorry for the poor experience you had.

I got no response when asking about when a bug that was fixed in an upstream library might lead to a new binary being released. It'd at least be nice to hear "I have no idea, we're busy."

Re: Atlas by Hashicorp

#20

Post by jimmcslim »

tonglil wrote: post #5
jzelinskie wrote: post #2

There have been some cool tools coming out of Hashicorp, but I haven't read any experiences with people using their "full stack". Does anybody want to give their own anecdote or maybe have a link to related article?

- Vagrant is a given, wonderful. - Packer is for syncing VirtualBox, AWS AMIs, and what not for quick and stable starting points, also wonderful. - Consul is great for monitoring and running a services oriented architecture, haven't pushed it to its full potential though. - Serf: n/a, haven't tried yet. - Terraform: n/a. We are still using Ansible as the provisioner. Overall, good ecosystem, would recommend.

Consul is built on top of Serf (the protocol at least), so given you are already using Consul, Serf wouldn't add anything for you.
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