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by eropple
3198 days ago
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Agreed, and the perception here matters. The cult of the five minute demo is real and people pick tools outside of their areas of expertise based on "well, it looked okay and there are blogs about it". The likelihood of bad stuff (whether bad through ignorance, malice, or lack of maintenance) is much, much higher when using these artifacts that are opaque not (just) in terms of source--because, yeah, most people won't audit it--but in terms of functionality (because the adoptee doesn't know the topic well enough to know what's going on). You solve infrastructure problems with code, but infrastructure is not code and infrastructure requires a depth of understanding nobody's going to make disappear based on "magic." As you go downstack, the damage you can do increases. Depending on J. Random Dockerfile is problematic, as you're exposing your compute surface to the predations of a malicious update. Depending on J. Random Terraform Module opens you up to way deeper issues. These issues can only be solved by really understanding your stack, and five-minute-demo culture does not value understanding. |
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This is unfortunately necessary as code eats the world, and the number of programmers, tools and ecosystems proliferates. Popularity is necessary for infrastructure tools to get enough eyeballs and resources to achieve stability. It's not enough for experts with decades of experience to design really solid but arcane tools, because the flood of new startups with young engineers coming in saying "do we really need that?" will overwhelm than faster than all the failures can be pointed out.
Ultimately, the quality of the tools is orthogonal to the presentation. My perception is Hashicorp has done much better in this regard than Docker, so there's that at least. Only time will tell how it really shapes up over time, but I believe Hashicorp tools are seeing massive uptake for more reasons than just good marketing.