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Comment by bbu | Hacker News Reader

Puppet was great about 10-12 years ago. It made the management of hundreds of VMs a breeze. Thank you Puppet Labs!

But the time of VMs has passed for most companies and by now there are better solutions available, so it makes sense to sell this off as long as it's worth something.

Not sure why this announcement was called an Open Letter?

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I think VMs are going to start coming back in vogue when companies now that are highly dependent on cloud services start to realize the cost swing back to owning bare metal machines at scale is actually cheaper once your general work loads stabilize.

I think Puppet and Ansible still have a future, its just a "down time" for their popularity right now.

Even if it's more cost effective to own the host machines (whether it be bare metal or VM), I'd guess you still save yourself considerable management headaches if you continue to put containers on them. There is still some stuff to manage with something like puppet and ansible, but I think if most of your configuration is in containers, it gets a lot simpler and these tools become less critical/complicated.

As noted elsewhere it was likely called and Open Letter because the acquisition is probably understood internally to be not what they wanted to happen, but they were out of options.

Agree! I felt like puppet missed an opportunity to be an IaaC for cloud providers/provisioning, especially with containers. From my experience, developers switch to other tools (terraform, ansible, etc) to fill the gap.

If that was the case we wouldn't have KataContainers or isolated Windows containers.

Apparently there are some benefits to VMs.

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