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I don’t disagree, but what is there for a terraform-like state config management system for bare metal and VMs when they are necessary? What provisions the machines that run the clusters?

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I see Ansible as a glorified task runner and every time I’ve used it, never get the same results twice. Idempotency is by convention only and if a single step fails it can be hard to recover.

Nix has its warts however I think what Nix tries to achieve is what most people want on bare metal instead of Ansible. Declarative, you describe the end state then nix makes it happen. Exactly the same as Terraform.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve used Chief/Puppet but found them much better than Ansible also. The thing is any professional job I do now, every one uses Ansible as much as I dislike programming in YAML.

I agree with you there as well. Ansible was great in theory but I’m with you in that I feel like I rarely got idempotent results like I would with Terraform.

Hate to only shill hashi stack but packer if you must. All you need is a container runtime and linux kernel. After that you shouldn't have to think about the core node.

If you're _really_ bare metal - build the base image, boot pxe and run apt update - not much more complicated than that.

Forgot about Packer! Thanks! That’s probably the closest equivalent.

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