InfraKit, for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

InfraKit, for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure

blog.docker.com

96 pointsdankohn122 comments

I have worked at large companies before, and one theme of them was always stagnation. They never really expanded after their initial product was developed. Years and years worth of man-hours were just spent on beauracracy, reinventing the wheel and just sitting around doing nothing (harshly put). A lot due to the leadership and lack of motivation.

I'm just so amazed by the level of innovation going on at Docker, and none-stop delivering of new features. All the while building a very solid base product. I'm genuinly intrigued at how they are able to do this, and grow so fast. How can all these new products be spawned, and yet still be relevant in the grand scheme of things? Sorry for sounding preachy, I really love what Docker is doing.

And technically there is probably a lot to dislike about Docker. I get that vibe from some comments in this thread. While everything is not perfect (yet), the Docker eco-system is just such a besutiful blend of user experience and function. Even their marketing is spot on. It feels almost like I started loving Docker because of the cute whale!

Not a dig against Docker but in my experience usually that stagnation kicks in when you're reasonably profitable or the end of the investment money is nowhere in sight. Gotta stay hungry. Always.

As part of this mission, we have always endeavored to contribute software plumbing toolkits back to the community, following the UNIX philosophy of building small loosely coupled tools that are created to simply do one thing well.

Great stuff. Coffee just shot out my nose.

Cool, but do you really Have to keep putting everything in docker engine?

The "live open-sourcing" onstage at LinuxCon Europe was pretty neat. :D

I'm waiting to be convinced this is a better approach than leaning on AWS autoscaling. I'm not super familiar with Azure, but it looks like that have availability sets which may offer the same basic abilities as autoscale groups.

This could be an interested bare-metal solution though; would need to write a connector for a bare-metal providers provisioning API though. I'm guessing profit bricks and Rackspace would be good places to start..

So is this like Terraform?

Docker founder here.

InfraKit is a higher-level component, it focuses on production deployment and "self-healing" state reconciliation. You can actually use terraform as a backend for infrakit.

Another difference is that Infrakit is not a standalone tool, it's a component designed to be embedded in a higher-level tool. For example we're embedding it in the Docker platform for built-in infrastructure management.

I love it. Also, coming from a background in CFEngine, I see a lot of familiar motifs. Low-level primitives, check. Audit and repair, check. Declarative description of desired state, check. Distributed, check. Good stuff. All workable approaches as proven since 1993 by CFEngine. I certainly wish Docker the best.

Thanks :) I am a cfengine fan myself, it inspired me to start working on what would eventually become Dotcloud then Docker. There was also Radmind and ISconf, which did not enjoy the same success.

I still remember reading the "infrastructure thinking" paper [1] and being blowm away by the concept. Back then (around 2005) calling it infrastructure as opposed to just "servers" was radical and unusual.

There was also a paper on "computer immunology" which I found really inspiring.

[1] http://www.infrastructures.org

[2] http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~soma/biosec/readings/burgess-...

Great! Appreciate all your work. :)

Maybe more like bosh https://bosh.cloudfoundry.org

Update: there seems to be support for terraform configs

It's a lot like BOSH however, BOSH treats dependency packaging as part of its purview. Whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate I suppose.

Terraform meets Consul?

Yup, and it somehow also includes Packer, Kubernetes, Spinnaker and Mesos.

Don't get me wrong, but this looks like it's trying to be systemd for infrastructure orchestration - and I don't mean that in a particularly good way. This design is just all over the place.

Would that be Atlas?

This was worked on by Bill Farner, of Apache Aurora (Mesos) fame and his team. Nice job gents!

Hmm, does anyone know how it compares to Ansible? It looks similar at a first glance.

They are quite different.

- Ansible is a standalone tool with a very broad scope ("automation for everyone").

- InfraKit is an embeddable component with a very narrow scope ("create and manage declarative, self-healing infrastructure").

If Ansible were written today, it could probably embed InfraKit to implement low-level infrastructure management.

Reminds me of packer, after first glance, the whole 'working with azure/aws' aspect. So I'd be curious how it differs there.

This looks similar to the k8s design. In theory could one build a plugin to run k8s on top of this? Then you could easily switch between swarm and k8s?

> In theory could one build a plugin to run k8s on top of this? Then you could easily switch between swarm and k8s?

Yes, absolutely, you could use Infrakit to provision any kind of infrastructure using a custom "flavor".

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