What was the inspiration? What problem(s) did you have with other tools that Vespene solves?
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.