Ask HN: Configuration Management in 2016, how are you doing it?

2 points·aprdm··3 comments

With Docker getting more and more space and the docker ecosystem being so good with docker machine, docker engine, docker compose and docker swarm. Can Docker replace entirely CM tools?

Looks like using ansible + docker for a small app is a completely overkill and mess, everything can be solely managed with the docker tools.

View on HN

It's not like Docker is the ultimate tool. Docker, as far as I know, has very messed up networking, which is not apparent until you need anything non-standard. Also, Docker is not as debuggable as a regular service started by initscript. It's not going to replace bare metal servers, virtualized servers, or even containers, on top of which it is built.

Considering these, there will always be a place for configuration management tools, like CFEngine and its derivatives, or for orchestration tools, especially the ones that are not tied to a specific way of running things. I don't think Docker on its own can do much good in a heterogenic environment, and most of the big environments that lasted some time are heterogenic.

Ansible and CloudFormation here.

Cfn has many more drawbacks than I'd like, but there will always be edge cases and new features not supported by the transpiled alternatives, and some form of cfn is really the only way to go for small/early AWS deployments.

Ansible is, of course, just awesome ;)

No docker in my shop... though we do manage almost everything with Ansible. All our apps are java-VM based, so a few playbooks to install Linux and OpenJDK and a few startup scripts is about all we need.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com