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Decommissioning Otto

hashicorp.com

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Re: Decommissioning Otto

#101
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I spent some time studying your product, and it looks like you'd like to charge me $100/month besides for a worse experience with more constrained features than what Packer gives me. At a very fundamental level it doesn't even look like it considers the notion that not everything is an app , that high-availability, fault-tolerant services exist and need to be run, that even "immutable" servers need a consistently…

First of all thank you for evaluating our work. As I clearly stated in my post above, Boxfuse isn't intended as a general purpose replacement for Packer. If your usage falls within the usecases I highlighted it can be a very good fit though. As for the notion of "immutable" servers, this industry term means servers that aren't updated in place, not servers without a read-write file system or read-write memory. In the…

Boxfuse is not an alternative to Packer, though, except from a very great distance if one squints. It is a restricted platform play. This is why I asked how Boxfuse deploys Zookeeper, not a Zookeeper client. Which it can't do, which makes it even further not an alternative because anybody who's going to have even a moderately complex environment--which is to say "anybody who needs more than RDS"--is going to still need Packer (or a configuration management rig, Packer's just memoizing a lot of the initial stuff you'll re-run on convergence) to build out the rest of the infrastructure.

I'll be honest: I cannot envision a company that should use Boxfuse. Not one. They're better off with something like a Racker template that takes a few parameters and feeds them into Packer than your spooky-action-at-a-distance stuff.

Re: Decommissioning Otto

#102
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned Chef and Ansible. Using both? What are you thoughts on one vs the other? Chef seems more powerful / flexible, ansible maybe a bit simpler.

I'm not the parent, but I've used both (Chef more heavily - going on 6 years, and I'm certified as a Chef trainer). Your assessment is roughly correct, Ansible is definitely easier to get started with, and if you just want to manage a small number of nodes that you have SSH access to, it's a good choice. Chef has a larger ecosystem, and a different communication model (VMs under management communicate out to a Chef s…

Thanks for explaining. We are using Chef heavily and we like it, but some people have been experimenting with Ansible so we started to wonder how they would compare in general. The concensus seems to be to stay with Chef.
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