Comment by mdaniel

Comment by mdaniel 4 days ago

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> not spending more time writing Terraform.

Also, there's another bit of nuance to that, as well as your overarching point about "automation isn't free," in that writing Terraform/Tofu isn't usually the long pole in that tent: debugging the raging PoS most certainly is (along with its associated https://xkcd.com/303/ of waiting for the "plan, attempt apply, puke, goto 1" loop)

And, in almost the exact same vein: writing any automation carries with it two downstream bits of work: monitoring the automation and having enough context to debug it when (WHEN) it falls over

MrBuddyCasino 4 days ago

People don’t know about https://dagger.io/, which solves this.

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  • mdaniel 3 days ago

    My experience has been it's not a lack of knowledge it's a combination of inertia, cargo culting, and give-a-shit

    There are so many great tools that solve so many problems but life is filled with trade-offs and many people don't value the same trade-offs that I do, so they just bash their head against Terraform (or $other_legacy_tool) because "it's what we use"

    I was really hoping that Earthly or Dagger were going to catch on due to the enormous number of folks that complain about not being able to run GitHub Actions (or GLCI) locally, on top of bitching about yaml alllllllllll the fucking time. But, same problem, IMHO: inertia is so strong

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    • MrBuddyCasino 3 days ago

      The fundamental issues is that devops guys don't have a budget with which to buy tools like Dagger (or Earthly), so the market is limited to companies that have tech-literate management - very small.

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      • JohnMakin 3 days ago

        It's somewhat this, a lot the fact that a huge, unbelievable chunk of "devops" guys are former sysadmins pigeonholed into devops because every organization thought that was a natural progression, so the odds of finding a devops engineer that is very good at writing go or javascript is kind of a unicorn, at least in my experience (I have to hire sometimes). They're usually fairly proficient with scripting languages, but sometimes not even that. Since terraform/HCL/YAML are more configuration languages with a lot less "logic" in them, it's more comfortable for a lot of people with that background, especially when they're already used to tools like ansible/helm/etc.

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