Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely adore HashiCorp's tools, but every time I read a sentence like this, I'm disappointed:

> We'll deploy the application to AWS for the getting started guide since it is popular and generally well understood, but Otto can deploy to many different infrastructure providers.

Okay, great! I'll just go look at the infra types list and...oh, it's only aws right now [0].

[0] - https://ottoproject.io/docs/infra/index.html

AWS isn't just easy to setup and use, it's also very expensive. On the free tier, things are wonderful and the world is fine, but if you've exhausted the free tier, you're now paying a lot through the nose for little to no benefit. I pay Kimsufi less than $50/mo for more storage, unmetered bandwidth, and more CPU on dedicated hardware at the cost of the AWS API. This makes using this tool and many other HashiCorp tools completely impossible to use for me because I'm not using AWS infrastructure. I can't afford to shell out crazy high monthly bills for the overhead AWS adds only for the convenience of one tool.

This is disappointing, and quite frankly, a major turnoff to these sorts of tools.

They only just released version 0.1.

Then perhaps it's inappropriate to claim that "Otto can deploy to many different infrastructure providers" until "Otto can deploy to many different infrastructure providers".

Good point. More like they aim to eventually deploy to many different infrastructure providers.

Right or wrong, it's pretty standard practice to sell the vision of the product as opposed to the actuality of the product.

"Otto will some day hopefully be able to deploy to many different infrastructure providers" isn't a particularly attractive statement. You could try something like "Otto currently only supports deploying to AWS, but will eventually support many more" but while perhaps technically correct it'll probably shy more people away than get them involved. Those same people might just contribute additional deploy targets if only they got nudged enough to get involved in the first place.

You're not wrong, but getting people on board with the vision is much more important for a "hive mind" project such as Otto, than being technically correct as to the current state of things.

No, it's not standard practice. It's false advertising.

I'm not saying it isn't; I'm just saying that people do this all the time. Many times just to fake it till you make it, other times to be willfully be deceptive. I doubt it's the latter in this case.

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