Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway787544

> There’s company-wide alignment on delivering the best user experience possible. That means sales, marketing, product engineering, product design, and customer success all channel their efforts into creating a product that provides an unparalleled UX. Product development puts all departments on the same wavelength in terms of the end goal.

Who the fuck are they talking about? Clearly not HashiCorp. The most popular tool in HashiCorp's ecosystem that wasn't written by them was written by a consulting firm who hated HashiCorp's UX. Hashi is like Amazon: shitty UX, but features that capture a market early, and so they remain a dominant player despite shitty UX and unnecessary overcomplicated bullshit.

There are only two things that you need to succeed with open source. 1) solve a problem nobody else has solved yet and drive massive adoption. 2) make it so that eventually people realize they can't get any farther without paying for enterprise features, and their lock-in and over-confidence from the free product will make them convince their bosses to pay you.

I'm assuming you are talking about terraform?

The UX of all the other hashi products I've used have been absolutely sublime compared to the industry equivalents. Nomad compared to kubernetes is a particularly stark contrast.

Yeah vault is great… unless you need to store 4096bit keys on a postgres backend… can't do that.

> The most popular tool in HashiCorp's ecosystem that wasn't written by them was written by a consulting firm who hated HashiCorp's UX

Which tool is that?

On a related note, Vault has a really excellent API. A joy.

> Vault has a really excellent API. A joy.

Strongly disagree: suppose we have secrets mounted at my/secrets, and we want to read a secret top/secret, which is represented as my/secrets/top/secret path in vault. However, the only way to access it via API is to read _all_ mount points, and match them with the path to split path to mount point and secret. vault cli itself follows the same logic: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/command/kv_help...

We’re using different Vaults it seems. HashiCorp’s tech is a mess of over engineering, poor UX, and insufficient documentation.

>HashiCorp’s tech is a mess of over engineering, poor UX, and insufficient documentation.

Second that. Very steep learning curve for some use cases that could be accomplished in a much easier way. Another kubernetes in disguise.

k8s in disguise? Vault? Have you used either of these tools?

They're talking about Nomad here, with the "tech" in the GP comment widening the discussion, I assume.

I'm assuming this is Terragrunt, which itself perpetuates all kinds of horrific practices which are absolutely unnecessary if you apply basic software engineering principles to infrastructure as code/config.

Terragrunt is an antipattern. Made the mistake once with a very poorly structured project I inherited, never again.

Terragrunt is not an anti-pattern, but it is a tool that is easier to get wrong than Terraform and so people create great messes with it.

Used right it's the only way to remain sane on any non-trivial set of infra where you don't end up hand-rolling a half-baked version of Terragrunt.

Managing 10^5 servers right now with Terragrunt. Can confirm, it's the only way to stay sane.

Getting to this point was a learning process though. Probably six solid years of investment now.

From experience terragrunt + atlantis has been much better experience than hashicorp's own terraform enterprise service.

not using terraform enterprise.

"Code generation" is pure evil.

I second that Terraform needs to work at least on dynamically specifying providerblocks. This is where people usually resort to terragrunt.

Workspaces and state layering are in my experience hard on the novices and unfortunately they turn to terragrunt.

Not disagreeing, but you have to create a shit ton of scaffolding to work around TF's lack of useful functionality and painful UX. Terragrunt exists because somebody had to do the same, and then kept adding on "smart" features making it even more overcomplicated.

Could you express more? There's gotta be a good use case for Terragrunt; they have been useful so far for me

Do you know of any articles or other writeups about this?

Where does it say Terragrunt is part of Hashicorp?

> The most popular tool in HashiCorp's ecosystem that wasn't written by them was written by a consulting firm who hated HashiCorp's UX

This is the initial comment about Terragrunt, which doesn't say that

Indeed: it says the exact opposite.

Good, we both agree that no one in this thread suggested terragrunt is developed by hashicorp?

Vault is excellent.

All of HashiCorp's products have splendid UX — what are you on about? Have you actually used their other products aside from Terraform, which I'm assuming you're referring to?

I don't understand why some people hate teraform so much.

Because it sucks. It has all the quirks and a whole lot of mess. That's terraform. Terraform Enterprise and Cloud must have been developed as a fuck you to enterprises, because it absolutely sucks.

I work with them daily, and have done so for 4 years now. It still sucks.

Unfortunately it's (Terraform, not TFE/TFC) the best in its class, and quite frankly I'm not smart to solve its issues.

If you're having a bad time with TFC/TFE, make sure to check out Spacelift[0].

We're striving to build a product that's both highly customizable and has a good UX, improving on many of the pain points. The migration path is straightforward and it'd be great to hear what you think about it!

[0]: https://spacelift.io

Disclaimer: Software Engineer at Spacelift

I have checked it out. Also checked out Scalr and some other one that I can't remember the name of. Issue isn't finding an alternative, it's convincing the team to move away from TFE and TFC.

Terraform is great... until you hit one of it's many limitations, or run into a bug in a provider that really ruins your day.

Plenty of people probably never run into those problems. But if you do, it's pretty terrible.

To be fair, there isn't really anything better. Pulumi and CDK address some of the limitations by using a "real" programming language, but introduce different issues. And bugs in providers are probably unavoidable, and are partly the fault of poor APIs from cloud providers.

Agreed. And nobody tries to replace it because nobody could replace all those providers without an army of engineers. And nobody is going to use a new project that only implements one or two APIs.

> run into a bug in a provider that really ruins your day

Most of these problems I encounter aren't even down to hashi themselves. The GCP provider consumes from google's magic modules repo, which is often out of sync with the GCP API. Or in plenty of cases, it is in sync, but the API does not expose features in the same way as the console.

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