Comment by stackskipton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stackskipton | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

State can drift in SI as well unless you are subscribing to events from AWS that alert your system as soon as resource is changed so you can update your side.

>the code you write is operating on that model, not generating that model.

What are you talking about? That model is not reality because reality is whatever the state of resource is in AWS. If your model says my S3 bucket is not public but someone changes it in AWS to make it public, who cares, it's public and that's what's important. Sure, your system may update itself more frequently than only when I run "tofu plan/apply" but at end of the day, it doesn't matter.

All I'm saying as SRE, you have done poor job selling this to me. I'm telling you what I would tell my boss if he came to me with this product.

"This is some custom IaC system with AI Agents sprinkled on top. I guess if you want to get rid of SRE team and replace us with their consultants, whatever, I won't be here to care. If you want us as SRE team to use it, nope, it's a waste of money since OpenToFu has much better support. Can you approve my SpaceLift purchase instead?"

> Sure, your system may update itself more frequently than only when I run "tofu plan/apply" but at end of the day, it doesn't matter.

Correct me if I'm wrong here. In my experience you have to "apply" before state is updated. This would mean we weren't quite operating on the source of truth. (aws in this case).

100% it's a solvable problem with a TF centric tool chain. But it's still a problem that needs solving.

In my experience with SI it fades to the background. Now, I'm sure there is an edge case where someone edits something outside of SI while I'm trying to simultaneously update it in SI where things might break. I haven't run into it yet.

> All I'm saying as SRE, you have done poor job selling this to me

Can't argue this, but I would say like any other new tool, it's worth checking out. :)

Yes, at apply stage, the state is updated. All the state is useful for is finding the resource for big 3. In fact, I'd argue for TF, they could do away with state file beyond resource "s3_bucket" "thebucket" -> arn:aws:s3:us-east-2:000:0123455 since they pull down the current state of system as is and then show you the "This is what you want and with current state, this is what it will change."

> I would say like any other new tool, it's worth checking out. :)

I don't see the need for a couple of reasons:

1) How? If you want me to try something, either big "TRY ME" unless it involves becoming a client which that case, I see you as replacing me so my motivation is zero. :D

2) I'm on Azure for most part so it's useless anyways.

3) You have not shown me how SI is that much better than Terraform. If I'm going to invest time over yelling at Kubernetes, I need to know my time is worth it.

At the end of the day, we all want the same. Here is defined infrastructure, be it YAML, JSON, HCL, some GUI, API call to a system, Whatever AI is smoking. Ability to see what changes and make those changes. HCL/ToFu is what most of have picked because it's pretty open and widely supported across all the providers. You have to overcome all that. This blog post reads, we have this great new Windows Server thing that will blow your Linux Server stuff away completely with GUI and Siri.

Maybe that's what your customer base needs. However, at technology companies I work at, we don't need that. People editing outside IaC is done very slowly, deliberately and almost always backported. If not, you will get called out. It would like Dev writing code and no tests.

Thanks for responding. I love these conversations.

>1) How? If you want me to try something, either big "TRY ME" unless it involves becoming a client which that case, I see you as replacing me so my motivation is zero. :D

To be clear, I don't see this as having the capability to replace engineers. This is a new way to interact with your infrastructure.

But it also feeds into larger AI conversations as well. (probably out of scope for this conversation :) )

> This blog post reads, we have this great new Windows Server thing that will blow your Linux Server stuff away completely with GUI and Siri.

Now you crossed a line :D

Jokes aside, there is a HUGE community in the TF and now OT space, you can't argue that. The ecosystem of third-party tools to help support workflows is gigantic. Putting all of that aside, will that be the best way forever? I'm not saying that SI will replace either one of those, but I would say it's a new and refreshing way to tackle a similar problem space.

>2) I'm on Azure Sorry ;-P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com