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I have no faith in AWS executing on this successfully. I'd imagine an offering like the suggested one would have some kind of: a) UI to inspect the state of oth

by plesiv 6y ago

I have no faith in AWS executing on this successfully. I'd imagine an offering like the suggested one would have some kind of: a) UI to inspect the state of other clouds, b) provisioning capability that allows creation of resources in other clouds. On the UI front: - AWS UI toolkit has aged by this point and each day it feels more dated - CloudFormation, as their main cloud management UI is particularly bad (e.g. limited info on what caused a problem, not displaying ARNs of resources belonging to a stack systematically etc.) On the provisioning front: - Terraform and Pulumi are so much better than anything AWS offers, and that says something because even these tools are not great.

ablekh 6y ago
I agree with you on Terraform and Pulumi (I'm especially excited about the latter, due to extra benefits over Terraform). However, I think that you are missing the main point / theme of the post - it is not specifically about AWS' approach to multi-cloud, but rather about general dynamics of the multi-cloud trend.
- chucky_z 6y ago
  Check out Terraform CDK for a thing that is native to TF, allows real code, and is progressing real fast
  - ablekh 6y ago
    Thank you, will keep it in mind. However, Terraform CDK is far from being production-ready at the present time. Moreover, I would venture to guess that it will trail Pulumi in terms of both features and maturity (due to Pulumi team's first mover advantage as well as singular focus on their product, unlike HashiCorp's broad portfolio of products).
    - chucky_z 6y ago
      I’m a bit confused here. Isn’t Pulumis big claim that it’s compatible with Terraform providers?? Why would Terraform trail that?
      - ablekh 6y ago
        Yes, Pulumi is compatible with Terraform providers. However, it is a declarative backend compatibility. In terms of imperative frontend, as I said, Pulumi team has both first mover advantage as well as singular focus on their product, unlike HashiCorp with its broad portfolio of products, where Terraform CDK is just one of them (hence, lack of the laser focus).
the_duke 6y ago
Do you have practical experience with Pulumi in large deploymenets? Is it bug free and dependable? I would like to try it out as a Terraform replacement, but but the popularity and corresponding module availability and maturity is hard to match.
- matharmin 6y ago
  My team has a lot of practical experience with Pulumi, after using custom bash scripts, manually-managing AWS config, some Terraform and CloudFormation in the past. We use it for dozens of services on Kubernetes and AWS. While we did have to write some of our own tooling to reduce the boilerplate over different services, Pulumi has been by far the best tool we've found to do the deployments. Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate. We haven't had any issues with module availability (I think it uses/adapts Terraform modules to a large extent). The config as code feels way more approachable and reusable than any other tool I've seen. I've never had any production issues because of Pulumi. It also allows you to preview changes before applying them, giving a nice confidence boost in the changes.
  - sciurus 6y ago
    > Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate. FWIW we do that with a small amount of glue code in our deployment tool that takes terraform outputs and passes then as values into helm.
  - pluies 6y ago
    > Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate. Terraform does this very well too, using either the Kubernetes provider or the Helm provider.
- cmclaughlin 6y ago
oblio 6y ago
> - AWS UI toolkit has aged by this point and each day it feels more dated They're rewriting the console: https://abduzeedo.com/amazon-web-services-design-system https://abduzeedo.com/amazon-web-services-design-system At least a few of their services have already been updated.

by plesiv 6y ago

ablekh 6y ago

I agree with you on Terraform and Pulumi (I'm especially excited about the latter, due to extra benefits over Terraform). However, I think that you are missing the main point / theme of the post - it is not specifically about AWS' approach to multi-cloud, but rather about general dynamics of the multi-cloud trend.

chucky_z 6y ago
Check out Terraform CDK for a thing that is native to TF, allows real code, and is progressing real fast
- ablekh 6y ago
  Thank you, will keep it in mind. However, Terraform CDK is far from being production-ready at the present time. Moreover, I would venture to guess that it will trail Pulumi in terms of both features and maturity (due to Pulumi team's first mover advantage as well as singular focus on their product, unlike HashiCorp's broad portfolio of products).
  - chucky_z 6y ago
    I’m a bit confused here. Isn’t Pulumis big claim that it’s compatible with Terraform providers?? Why would Terraform trail that?
    - ablekh 6y ago
      Yes, Pulumi is compatible with Terraform providers. However, it is a declarative backend compatibility. In terms of imperative frontend, as I said, Pulumi team has both first mover advantage as well as singular focus on their product, unlike HashiCorp with its broad portfolio of products, where Terraform CDK is just one of them (hence, lack of the laser focus).

the_duke 6y ago

Do you have practical experience with Pulumi in large deploymenets? Is it bug free and dependable? I would like to try it out as a Terraform replacement, but but the popularity and corresponding module availability and maturity is hard to match.

matharmin 6y ago
My team has a lot of practical experience with Pulumi, after using custom bash scripts, manually-managing AWS config, some Terraform and CloudFormation in the past. We use it for dozens of services on Kubernetes and AWS. While we did have to write some of our own tooling to reduce the boilerplate over different services, Pulumi has been by far the best tool we've found to do the deployments. Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate. We haven't had any issues with module availability (I think it uses/adapts Terraform modules to a large extent). The config as code feels way more approachable and reusable than any other tool I've seen. I've never had any production issues because of Pulumi. It also allows you to preview changes before applying them, giving a nice confidence boost in the changes.
- sciurus 6y ago
  > Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate. FWIW we do that with a small amount of glue code in our deployment tool that takes terraform outputs and passes then as values into helm.
- pluies 6y ago
  > Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate. Terraform does this very well too, using either the Kubernetes provider or the Helm provider.
cmclaughlin 6y ago

oblio 6y ago

> - AWS UI toolkit has aged by this point and each day it feels more dated They're rewriting the console: https://abduzeedo.com/amazon-web-services-design-system https://abduzeedo.com/amazon-web-services-design-system At least a few of their services have already been updated.