| > Yes, I agree with this. However, its predictable. As an operations person, I value predictability and am willing to pay the price of keeping static configs in sync. I think there's wisdom in this at small scales, but as the volume and complexity of your boilerplate grows, I think you lose any advantages. I also think this threshold is quite low (as an ops person and a dev person) since it's not much harder to look at/read the YAML generated by a script vs that which is hand-rolled and committed to git. > Hold on, I'm not conflating anything. Are you sure? Because you just said "I am willing to pay the price of keeping static configs sync" and then "For infrastructure, declarative languages are a lot more suitable for the properties they provide" and then you started to talk about "static types" in Python, which is different than "static" in the YAML sense (YAML isn't statically typed, but it is static in that it isn't evaluated or executed). I'm not trying to be a jerk, it just sounds like a lot of concepts are being confused. I also wasn't making the argument "you can write terrible things in any language" (not sure if you were attributing that argument to me or if that was a point you were trying to make). Consider this Python: https://github.com/weberc2/nimbus/blob/master/examples/src/n... It's fully declarative, but it does evaluate, so it's not static in the YAML sense. It outputs a JSON CloudFormation template (but it could easily output in YAML) which you could inspect visually before passing onto CloudFormation. It's also statically typed although that's not evident from this file since all types are inferred in this file (however there are annotations in the imported libraries), and while the static typing is a very useful property, it's not what I've been talking about in this thread. In my opinion, this is no less readable than the equivalent YAML; however, it's capable of doing much more (albeit if your infrastructure is just one S3 bucket, then this is overkill--to really understand the power of dynamic configuration, you would want a more complex example). |