| First off, it sounds like your playbooks sucked - sorry about that, with great power comes great responsibility. Even as I wanted to make things simple, all things could be abused, and in adding more flexibility I've seen some evil things done in my name :) So as immutable systems grow - that's a damn good thing. I personally think the docker ecosystem is a trainwreck currently, but that's only my opinion, and doesn't really affect anyone else. But the same concepts have been around for ages in EC2 in immutable systems. What typically happens is people use the CM tool to provide a higher level abstraction than Bash for describing the image build, so they get features that should have always been in docker files but never were (templates are the biggest one for me). Further, there is always a need to deploy the "undercloud". Even in heavily containerized microservices setups, there's a need to handle all the magic upgrade fun of upgrading a Mongo cluster, a Cassandra cluster, or a Kafka setup. Whether we call it configuration management, app deployment, or just a structured way to push scripts around and see what failed, we're going to need those tools. I believe immutable systems is a fantastic philosophy where it works. It doesn't work everywhere. And CM tools still have a niche for those that want to use them in the build process. If folks want straight docker files instead, I'm also cool with that. |