Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp • Hacker News Board

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#61

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #48

threatofrain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people here think about Pulumi?

I like the concept of using different languages instead of terraform because I consider the latter to provide pretty terrible developer experience. I don't like the idea of having a Turing complete language to do that. I would prefer things to be declarative. Honestly I would just be happy with a better terraform without yaml and better tooling for terraform. I tried to use pulumi and they didn't support something I…

[deleted]

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#62

Post by CGamesPlay » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #28

CGamesPlay wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! I may even have looked at that when I was getting started on this project. The two things that jump out at me as "not as easy" are private docker repos and cron jobs. I know that you can run cron images for Docker, but I didn't want the extra layer of indirection.

Hmm, what do you mean? You don't have to use either of those with Harbormaster.

I wanted to use both of them :)

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#63

Post by stavros » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #62

stavros wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, what do you mean? You don't have to use either of those with Harbormaster.

I wanted to use both of them :)

Oh, well, you can :P

Can you go into a bit more detail about your setup?

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#64

Post by CGamesPlay » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #19

shell0x wrote: post #5

As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…

What do people here think about Pulumi?

I really like Pulumi, and have done some really interesting stateful infrastructure work using it in the past. Because you get a full programming language, you can definitely code yourself into a knot that is difficult to debug, but the saving grace for Pulumi I think is that the output of the program is a simple declarative object describing the target state. So you can almost think of Pulumi as a generator for Terraform files.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#65

Post by CGamesPlay » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

humblepie wrote: post #51

I've been using nomad for smaller setups in AWS and it's been great. The biggest issue I've encountered on it is when you move out of AWS (and you can't apply EC2-based IAM) but still have S3-hosted artifacts. Specifically it cannot receive Vault secrets for the artifact credentials because the nomad templates get applied at a much later stage.

Have you looked into levant? Seems like it would allow you to do this. Now, with levant the developer machine would be the thing retrieving the vault secrets, but it may be a useful stopgap.

https://github.com/hashicorp/levant

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#66

Post by c7DJTLrn » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

shell0x wrote: post #5

As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…

I seem to recall that years ago, Terraform was touted as an abstraction layer for cloud providers meaning that you could write some HCL and move between them seamlessly. A solution for vendor lock-in. Maybe that was nonsense but that's certainly not the case today.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#67

Post by toiletduck » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #50

AstroDogCatcher wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, do you find yourself writing actual software with CDK stacks integrated, or is it more accurate to say the CDK is just a stand-alone bit of code purely for deploying infrastructure? I'm definitely in the latter camp, which is something I find frustrating. I get that for a developer the syntax familiarity might make CDK easier, but for me as a non-developer the pain of groping around the terrible docu…

I strongly suspect that these CDKs are not very well designed. In particular, what I want is something that lets me generate YAML/etc in a type-safe fashion. That YAML is then the input for an engine which reconciles the desired state with the actual state (a la Terraform or cloudFormation). The idea is that the “real programming language” layer just allows us to DRY our YAML. For a use case like this, we don’t need…

Your suspicions are incorrect - I'd suggest trying the AWS CDK as it solves exactly the problem you want it to solve in the sense of providing strong type safety.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#68

Post by gtestault » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

zoidb wrote: post #11

I was looking into doing something similar with Nomad recently since lately I have been using systemd to launch containers and managing that config with some janky shell scripts. How are you configuring everything to run on a single server, including consul? Isn't Nomad designed to to run on multiple servers or are you running nomad in multiple containers on your VPS? When I looked into this previously I got to https…

Hey, I'm the author of the stack overflow answer. You can absolutely do it and it's pretty cool! Just keep in mind that you lose the advantages of a 3 node setup: data replication across nodes, failure tolerance, new leader election. That's why it's discouraged for production environments where things are meant to be up 24/24h

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#69

Post by CGamesPlay » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #63

CGamesPlay wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to use both of them :)

Oh, well, you can :P Can you go into a bit more detail about your setup?

Nomad has native support for periodic jobs that does not require running a cron docker image, and that was a big draw. As far as the private registry goes, I don't see why that would be particularly hard with a set of compose scripts, but I really liked the fact that Nomad has everything about them documented.

Honestly, if I had stuck with Compose files then Harbormaster looks like it's a reasonable way to manage them. But I felt like everything I wanted to do was just a little bit more difficult when I was using them, especially after comparing to Nomad.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#70

Post by throwaway894345 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

toiletduck wrote: post #67

throwaway894345 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect that these CDKs are not very well designed. In particular, what I want is something that lets me generate YAML/etc in a type-safe fashion. That YAML is then the input for an engine which reconciles the desired state with the actual state (a la Terraform or cloudFormation). The idea is that the “real programming language” layer just allows us to DRY our YAML. For a use case like this, we don’t need…

Your suspicions are incorrect - I'd suggest trying the AWS CDK as it solves exactly the problem you want it to solve in the sense of providing strong type safety.

My only experience is with the AWS CDK.