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Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

I legitimately have no idea what infrastructure provisioning tool to use anymore. I normally defaulted to Saltstack Masterless and Chef via Packer.

What "simple" tool is left anymore for me to create my immutable AMIs that aren't bound by some license?

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I went back to shell scripts.

For me, Ansible and Pyinfra, but I've been leaning on shell scripts for very simple things that I know will be mostly the same for 5-10+ years, and sometimes I wrap those into larger playbooks.

They're all good and bad in different ways. You just need to pick one. Ansible is GPL3, opentofu is Mozilla Public License.

For creating AMIs? Probably Ansible or something similar. Chef is great for ongoing management of servers, but not so good for a one-shot config run like you would do if you're creating AMIs.

I still use it for that. Built a really nice packer based process that pulls in Chef cookbooks and applies them in zero mode. Even have an integration test of the resulting AMI in later stages using test kitchen (Chef's "killer app" imo) with the EC2 driver to spin up an instance with the AMI and run Inspec tests on it.

For immutable infra, shell scripts are king. You're essentially just installing packages and copying files around, there's really no need to get any more complicated than that.

Ansible? Fabric? Cloud init?

Fabric is a favourite for this kind of thing (although I'm configuring VMs at runtime instead of building AMIs)

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