Hey folks, this is my new project. You might possibly remember me from creating Cobbler and Ansible.
I thought I'd share and if you have any questions, let me know!
I thought I'd share and if you have any questions, let me know!
(BTW thanks for ansible, it's awesome :) )
I'm used to seeing pages of checkboxes and can't stand how obscure some of the configuration is, but mostly I wanted to write something that could handle configuration differences between hundreds of projects, so that is why there are things like Snippets in Vespene.
Plus, I wanted to make something that was a little better for ops use cases (so people don't also have to go pick up something like Rundeck), so that's why there are things like the SSH integration and http://docs.vespene.io/launch_questions.html
It's more about capabilities and future capabilities than the frustrations IMHO.
Though I do have a bunch of friends who are frustrated with plugin compatibility, plugin hunting (we're doing more of a "batteries included" approach like I ran with ansible - just with much less modules), and stuff like that.
I was also able to add in some stuff like container build isolation really easily, and that's all included stock.
I also saw a lot of people trying to do ops style stuff from tools like Jenkins, which is why Ansible has built-in SSH automation so it can hold on to SSH keys and use them in your behalf, and has some really cool built in RBAC so you can decide who can run what and it can be different than who can edit what.
Mostly I just want to build an architecture that can go interesting places - what is here today I think is usuable, but it's just a starting point. My thinking is if you make an architecture that is really pluggable, and the code is easy to read and add to, it can go to some really neat places.
I'd just recommend taking a look at the various chapters of http://docs.vespene.io/ to get a feel for features, and if you like it, spin up a copy using the setup instructions and see what you think.
Refined framework (oh how I hate that word now thanks to web developers!) went into production in 2009 on Solaris 10, depending on advanced AT&T SVR4 packaging features. It was then subsequently ported to CentOS / RHEL RPM and went into production around 2011. It's been the corner stone of configuration management for the entire infrastructure, particularly production ever since.
While I "grew up" as it were, believing in RPM, we live in a very post-distro, multi-language kind of world, and there's a need for things to glue that together. How many times have I tried to campaign against "wget tarball" as a deployment mechanism, I don't know. It's rough and yes, there's a lack of discipline in ops that needs to improve.
Immutable systems is a VERY interesting way to solve that, but it doesn't work for certain stateful things and you always need something to deploy the undercloud.
I'd encourage you to try to build your own experimental project to try to find different ways to do it, as this is the only real way that technology ever gets ahead.
I have my own configuration management framework which can add and remove configuration from files that each package brings on. It's written in AWK. No knowledge is required to use it - configuration packages deliver just their configuration files' excerpts. In addition to being able to template them with regular shell variables, self-assembly is supported as well.
Then, what sort of happened is I kept running into overly complex Jenkins installs. The typical miles of config checkboxes was overwhelming for me, but a larger problem was that organizations would have like 200 microservices projects, and all the build scripts would be slightly different.
The idea was then to take the templating system from Cobbler - which allows lots of variables merged in at various levels, and Jinja2, and allow reuse of build scripts through variables and snippets.
There was some other frustration with Jenkins - the idea that it was a ginormous codebase and still not database based, and you had to hunt for good plugins.
Ansible was pretty successful for getting everybody together to contribute to common modules (it maybe took on too many though) and make sure you didn't have to go on too much of a plugin hunt. So could possibly we start a "batteries included" build system?
Finally, I wanted to try out some opportunity to merge the functionality of a build system with something like Rundeck, so you didn't need two tools. I also found Rundeck complicated to set up, but if you want to run some self-service automation, most people do that within their build system. So I figured I could add in some SSH and Q&A interactivity in there to easily get that going.
My other idea was to write a VM/container controller, and while I think there still needs to be a simple one as Kubernetes is getting to be a beast, that's too much work to bite off without a lot of help :)
Honestly the main thing is I just wanted to work with a lot of the same open source folks again (and a bunch of new ones), so I'm really looking forward to that!
I'm curious what you think of https://www.nomadproject.io/
One other reason I didn't build something is I don't have a current need to use something like that, so I'm probably not the one that should be developing it. There's a lot of datacenter use cases I'm ultimately not super familiar with.
I wanted another Science Fiction reference to something I loved.
Vespene gas is very important in build order.
My probable worst name was Cobbler (the PXE server) for those that were into cockney, but it was originally named "Shoe", and the idea was a Cobbler makes boots.
Lo siento!
For those who don’t understand it may sound like “(you) see penis”. But to be honest I didn’t even make the connection when I read it the first time.