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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

Ugh this comment triggers my hate for the current state of infrastructure. It's just configuration hell at this point. We thought all of these wrappers and services would make infrastructure easy, and they did to a certain degree, but it also created brand new problems that are arguably just as annoying as the old ones.

Edit: As a developer, I would rather sketch out the infrastructure that I need, then hand it off to someone whose entire job is to set up infrastructure. I work at a small startup where the devs are still doing a lot of infrastructure, and all it does is create technical debt. Without a solid team that owns infrastructural concerns, developers just end up digging themselves a grave.

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I think the problems are mostly around configuration that is so complex and redundant that we need programmatic abstractions to deal with it—we need something like a general purpose programming language to DRY up and simplify that configuration, but the powers that be are clinging desperately to YAML (despite encoding a shitty, half-baked AST on top of it a la CloudFormation or “generating” YAML with text templates a la Helm) as the human/configuration interface presumably because the “it’s as easy as YAML!” is such a good marketing schtick.

A certain amount of configuration complexity will always be there, but there’s still a lot of incidental complexity that could be cut away if we just generated these config a with a general purpose language.

HCL2 feels like the farthest ahead right now, if you don't want to deal with straight up python or ruby.

In case you haven't seen AWS' answer: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk

There are worse things than YAML. Dealing with hundreds of snow flake configuration formats that do not follow common sense rules cost me more time than working around mistakes in YAML. There are obviously some really, really stupid ideas like generating YAML with text templates but the problem isn't with YAML. It's the tool that generated the YAML file.

Isn't that the point of the article? That infrastructure actually isn't easy, and you're just hating the fact that it isn't?

Isn't that sort of like someone in Sales complaining about the "state of development" and asking why they can't just press a button and have a custom app to sell, like, tomorrow?

It doesn't feel like we've come very far at all from the first time I realized I could use nginx as a forward proxy and have the code just make all service calls to localhost. That seriously reduced the complexity for the development team.

Some days I just want a load balancer that can route traffic to whatever servers are up now and then I'd just have Docker, a service registry, a load balancer and I'd be done for a while. The easy bits should be easy, and they can't even manage that.

That's pretty much the experience I had with Consul and Traefik (containers orchestrated by Nomad).

Welcome to dev vs infrastructure vs ops vs devops.

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