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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

You still have to bootstrap the instances/droplets/etc with Docker, Kubernetes, etc before Dockerfiles can be used. Unless you're starting with images where those are already baked in, Ansible/Chef/Puppet are good ways to accomplish this on a clean OS.

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It's debatable. Ansible/Chef/Puppet themselves need to be bootstrapped as well.

Bash is perfectly fine if the machine can be installed with less than 100 lines of code and immutable infrastructure is being used (so no need for idempotent operations). Just make sure to add ShellCheck to the CI pipeline.

Ansible/Chef/Puppet themselves need to be bootstrapped as well.

Nope, Ansible just needs SSH access.

Remote hosts need Python, but you can use the raw command functionality to figure out what the remote package manager is and install Python as required.

Not when using AutoScaling Groups. Then the machine will be provisioned on boot and therefor ansible would have to be installed on the machine.

No, you'd use Ansible to prepare the new image once, then you'd use that image to scale. Bootstrapping everything each time a VM is created doesn't make much sense.

> Bash is perfectly fine if the machine can be installed with less than 100 lines of code

It is always tough to predict the future; something < 100 lines can easily grow over time. It is nice to start with a tool like Chef/Ansible/Puppet which can more easily grow as the project grows vs Bash.

I agree that it's hard to predict the future, that's why I'm not trying to add unnecessary dependencies. 100 lines of code are not hard to rewrite in anything else if necessary.

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