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Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

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31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#31
post #8
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…

The real world don't care about feelings.Feelings are extremely subjective making these kind of statements quite vague. As a person with alexithymia, this is so confusing, I have no idea what "feels good" is supposed to mean. I know it's not bad, but that's a big spectrum of meaning. Good doesn't mean great or brilliant either. Just confusing. Emotional blindness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia

Physical reality is barely changed by peoples' emotions (small shifts in their biochemistry).

Physical reality is very often changed significantly by the choices people make, which are rooted in their emotions.

So, while the universe as such may not care about emotions, they still matter as long as you're interacting with humans (including oneself).

FWIW, I'd not heard of alexithymia before, and I now am thinking I may have had it most of my life.

I've gotten much better at recognizing emotions in myself and others over the past two years through a combination of prayer, therapy, introspection (a skeptic might argue my prayer was just an obscured form of introspection), and reading (Non-violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg helped me immensely).

I've seen the world become much more comprehensible as this has changed - other humans are a big part of the world, given how dependent we all are on civilization for survival and thriving, and as hinted above, I now understand my own actions and choices much better too. Not being able to recognize my emotions didn't mean I had none.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#32

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…

out of curiosity, how did you like pulumi compared to terraform? I'm starting to hear about it more often

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#33

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…

fancy UIs usually don't even attempt to solve the primary problem that IaC does, which is change management. Systems where changes (rather than operations) are made through interactive UIs are a horror to manage; it works for extremely simple systems, but most systems don't qualify for that.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#34
I feel like infrastructure as code is one of those things that highlights your companies poor practices more than it does highlight the failures in say terraform or cloudformation.

A company that is willing to work at the code level to automate their systems will find tools like terraform and cloud formation useful, companies that have a LAMP stack from 2010 and no way to test their infrastructure changes in a safe way will not...

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, "feel" and "good" as used in this article is not about emotions; it's more of a shortcut that means "Do I trust that this is doing what I expect it to regarding (safety | stability | understandability)?" "Feel": "I trust." "Good": "Does what I expect it to."

"Trust" is (or at least can be) an emotion.

Trust is the faith that the subject won’t betray you or your interests despite being in a position to do so.

It’s a belief, not an emotion.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#36
post #23

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…

I think that terraform etc. are largely the wrong way of doing it. I think NixOS (or just the Nix package manager) is the right way of doing it but the Nix ecosystem has it's own separate set of issues. Mostly these are around (lack of) documentation making it impenetrable to get on board with. On the other hand, my feeling is that as your problems become harder and harder (your infrastructure gets more complex) Nix…

Nix is wonderful, and very difficult.

But, if you're talking about IaC, you need to more precisely talk about NixOps and how that compares to tools like Terraform or Pulumi. -- Overall, Nix isn't really aimed at solving IaC for cloud resources.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#37

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?

Terraform is amazing and is also very thin. It’s amazing to be able to commit your infrastructure to source control, but it’s nothing without effective well-maintained APIs that can be driven by Terraform providers.

I’ve built custom Terraform providers to map to custom APIs, and the experience was just fantastic. I’ve also used scripts with AWS resources that were a chore to use because the underlying API was a trash fire.

Specifically with respect to Terraform the language, the uniform adoption of functional programming concepts would be nice— right now providers expose varying ways of dealing with sets of resources in more or less confusing and incompatible ways (count, and the various times that you cannot use count).

So the problems with TF are twofold: the language is not quite consistent, and the ecosystem depends entirely on the quality of contributed providers and/or the module shims built on top of poor providers.

It can be easy to get frustrated during IaC development, but an absolute relief when you can rock deployments confidently.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#38

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. Ho…

I had this exact issue at a last company. We had a system that tore down and rebuilt our entire clusters to updates QPS estimates. It was the right idea and the right approach, but it was a big gnarly ball of code that broke frequently, requiring the steps it got stuck on to be done by hand and the code fixed for next time. So anyone working on it still had to know and be co dude that’s executing any arbitrary manual steps as well as understanding the code enough to fix it (or get the expert involved). I’m doubtful it was a net positive in that state.

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Asking my engineers to learn a completely new DSL (HCL) with its own quirks to change infrastructure felt like it ran against the spirit of IaC. If they were tweaking infrastructure every day, that’d be one thing, but it’s fairly hard to commit a language to your long term memory when you’re interacting with it only on occasion.

You can do Terraform in Java. Or Python. Or... https://www.terraform.io/cdktf

Re: Infrastructure as Code Should Feel

#40

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…

fancy UIs usually don't even attempt to solve the primary problem that IaC does, which is change management . Systems where changes (rather than operations) are made through interactive UIs are a horror to manage; it works for extremely simple systems, but most systems don't qualify for that.

And even for simple systems like my pet project it's just great to press enter once and have all different AWS resources deployed/updated/replaced/destroyed.
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