Otto, the successor to Vagrant • Hacker News Board

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#121

Post by XorNot » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:46 PM UTC

thejerz wrote: post #100

Walkman wrote: post #94

I don't understand why so many people are so scared/not interested/afraid of system administration. It's not that hard. Why does it have to be abstracted? Bringing more and more layers makes everything slower, more complex for sure. The only thing is really hard is configuring and managing an email server.

I agree, in spirit. Setting up an app server, a web server, a MySQL database, or a cron job is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. There are a lot of complex sysadmin tasks -- running a BIND server, an email server, a Cassandra cluster, etc. -- but that's not what the majority of developers are doing.

I don't understand it, but as an SA there's also a lot of people who are incapable of thinking 5 minutes ahead to the next problem - which is also baffling because its pretty much the same as programming.

You setup a cronjob, did you code the script well, who does is notify, how do we know when it fails, what's the recovery strategy?

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#122

Post by dlandis » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

I use Vagrant regularly for development work and it is a good tool, however, it does still have a lot of issues. I have also gotten the sense over the years that HashiCorp developers could have been more responsive to users and addressed more of the issues that mattered most to the user base.

And now, with a new, complex, and broad product introduced...I just don't have a lot of confidence that the quality is going to be there or that it will ever fulfill the very large goals that are outlined.

I would prefer they focused on Vagrant and made it a really outstanding, polished tool.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#123

Post by XorNot » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:49 PM UTC

acveilleux wrote: post #103

davexunit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JSON/YAML, possibly with support for templating like Ansible When you are writing templates for your configuration files, what you've wanted all along was a real programming language.

Yes and no, a lot of the ops folks I know peter out at pretty basic scripting and find a templating system easier.

Actually I'd love to be able to drop down to Python in my ansible playbooks/configs but ansible modules are very different to yaml/template files for the effort.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#124

Post by Cacti » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:52 PM UTC

wesleytodd wrote: post #18

So I feel like the reason I like Vagrant is because it does it's one job well, then gets out of my way. Doesn't sound like this shares that philosophy.

Probably because they did such a good job with Vagrant that they realized they were running out of things to do and decided, in the interests of job security, to ride the train a little longer by "pivoting."

Then again, who am I to complain? Vagrant is a superb tool and the endless and pointless reinventing of standards every few years keeps like 70% of us employed.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#125

Post by allanmacgregor » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:55 PM UTC

Does this mean that development focus will shift from Vagrant to Otto?

Is Otto mean to replace vagrant?

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#126

Post by Cacti » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 10:59 PM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #80

Seeing that it uses Vagrant behind the scenes, and other HashiCorp tools as well (meaning it does things beyond just local development environment configuration... which is what 99% of people use Vagrant for), how is Otto "the successor to Vagrant"? To me, it seems like it's just a bit of word play to try to get more interest in a product that is less interesting to some people. Vagrant is generic enough and helpful…

I think you've pointed out exactly the reason why this product exists.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#127

Post by parasubvert » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:08 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #83

ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't Otto named Vagrant 2.0 or something? Its confusing to be "abandoning" Vagrant for a new system "Otto" when really all that is happening is that Otto is fixing issues that have come up over time with Vagrant. Why not a migration strategy, some backwards compatibility during the translation, and then move into the future?

It's pretty depressing to see Hashicorp adding more layers to a system that already has way too much accidental complexity. Ruby on Rails, for instance, is a beautiful example of an internal DSL, but the Vagrant DSL is awful, you could write a much easier to read/use internal DSL in Java. Then there is the issue that Packer and Vagrant are two different tools. Why should you need to change anything about your provisi…

'People are screaming out today that "devops is a big waste of time" and I think 80% of that is that Packer and Vagrant are so awful and putting another layer is going to make it 95% awfulness from Hashicorp.'

Awful compared to what?

'And then there is the issue that when Vagrant can't talk to the mothership, it doesn't work right. It goes on and on.'

I'm curious, which package management tool have you seen that works when it can't talk to the mothership?

Hashicorp has a particular philosophy of how it builds and ships its ecosystem: small, standalone, composed tools. That leads to some overlap and inconsistent quality, as they evolve independently. Atlas is supposed to smooth over the overall experience, but, software is hard.

Alternative ecosystems tend to be large pills to swallow (i.e. PaaS), though they might have a better overall experience.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#128

Post by parasubvert » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:11 PM UTC

Cacti wrote: post #118

kvz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otto lets you create infra and deploy to it. So it covers production, not just development. On top of that it offers default stacks for PHP/Ruby/etc that will be maintained by the community. From what I understand, if you're demands aren't too specific, you'll profit from infra/os/apps all set up as a foundation for you app. It detects what app you have and hence you can even have an empty Appfile (similar to Vagrant…

I dunno, I have yet to find a real-world situation where the demands/requirements aren't "too specific". There are always obnoxious little kinks unless you are using some tool from scratch as the basis of your entire operation. Particularly in production! And I don't see why we need default stacks, don't we already have that with Vagrant? Isn't that the entire point of the Vagrant file and the setup file? You grab an…

"Why do we always have to keep expanding, cannot we not be happy with just really good tools for a really good specific purpose?"

Because that tool, along with the beer in their fridge, is for paid by VC money, who needs to recoup their investment. $99 Vagrant licenses for use with VMware isn't going to cut it.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#129

Post by atriix » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:16 PM UTC

Maybe Vagrant with Docker as backend will get some love now? That is native Docker (ie on a linux host) not just a separate vm to host Docker. The fact that one can't set static ip-address using the Vagrantfile is annoying.

Re: Otto, the successor to Vagrant

#130

Post by ascendantlogic » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 11:17 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #83

ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't Otto named Vagrant 2.0 or something? Its confusing to be "abandoning" Vagrant for a new system "Otto" when really all that is happening is that Otto is fixing issues that have come up over time with Vagrant. Why not a migration strategy, some backwards compatibility during the translation, and then move into the future?

It's pretty depressing to see Hashicorp adding more layers to a system that already has way too much accidental complexity. Ruby on Rails, for instance, is a beautiful example of an internal DSL, but the Vagrant DSL is awful, you could write a much easier to read/use internal DSL in Java. Then there is the issue that Packer and Vagrant are two different tools. Why should you need to change anything about your provisi…

> People are screaming out today that "devops is a big waste of time"

These people have obviously never managed fleets of servers pre-devops. Forgive me if the opinions of some devs who have never managed a server in their lives ranks lower than those who have been in the trenches for a while now.