zlacker

>>tpmx+(OP)
Whenever I get frustrated by cloud complexity I wonder if its all worth it, as HN, stackoverflow, camelx3 etc are still on real servers. Maybe it is worth it after all.

>>rr808+o3
I've wondered about this a lot recently as I've spent a lot of time recently fighting with Terraform, Atlantis, CircleCI, github and AWS. The first half of my career was deploying code to various UNIX machines. When there was a problem I could login to that machine and use various (common) tools to diagnose the issue. I may not have had root but I was at least able to gain insight into what was likely the culprit. The interface was immediate and allowed quick iteration to test out a solution.

It feels like we've lost a lot of that observability and immediacy with the cloud. It's not as easy to quickly understand the larger picture. You can understand the state of various services with the web console or command line tools but tracing a path through those services is much less obvious and efficient.

I'm kind of nervous to even discuss this as I wonder if it's just my age showing, especially since I see very people mention this as one of the downsides of various cloud solutions. Maybe I'm just jaded?

>>geoffe+bg
Oh my goodness yes. I had the "great" idea to use Azure Functions to do a task at work. It's **ing insane how difficult it is to specify an Azure Function all in code with reasonable CI/CD, AD permissions, logging, and dev/prod instances. I wrote about what it takes at https://www.bbkane.com/blog/azure-functions-with-terraform/ but the experience really soured me on cloud services.

>>bbkane+dz
Is this... a deliberate attempt at constructing a Rube Goldberg machine?

In all seriousness, at least 2/3rds of the complexity is because of your choice of tools and approach. Terraform alone makes things significantly more complex. If you just want to trigger a deployment, then a Template Spec made from a Bicep file could be banged out in like... an hour.[1]

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. You basically took a Microsoft product and tried to automate it with a bunch of Linux-native tools. Why would you think this would be smooth and efficient?

Have you ever tried automating Linux with VB Script? This is almost the same thing.

[1] Someone had a similar example here using Logic Apps and a Template Spec: https://cloudjourney.medium.com/azure-template-spec-and-logi...

>>jiggaw+zY
jiggawatts, this is an honest attempt. I'd LOVE it if there's an easier way I somehow missed.

And talk is cheap. I dare you to write a blog post or make a public GitHub repo doing the equivalent work (see Goals section) with your own tools. If you can, I'll be super impressed (not that my admiration is worth anything ).

One thing you'll run into is that AD roles and other authn aren't accessible via ARM templates/Bicep