marionette VS mgmt

I wrote a simple tool, which is modeled after puppet in terms of syntax. It was mostly an experiment to see what minimum required features are enough to provide something useful - and I settled on a few primitives such as creating files, installing packages, and running commands.

Despite the minimalism it turned out to be more useful than expected:

https://github.com/skx/marionette/

I added extra things, such as the ability to pull docker containers, and clone git repositories, and despite being single-host I'm using it to setup several virtual machines.

I wrote a proof-of-concept tool, inspired by puppet more than anything, but since it runs locally it is perhaps comparable to ansible too:

https://github.com/skx/marionette/

It turns out that three operations suffice for almost 90% of my needs:

* Populate a file, from a template with variable expansion.

* Run a shell-command.

* Install a package.

I added support for pulling a docker container too, just for fun. Although I never made the effort to pimp/promote it, the tool is stable and useful as-is.

This is a new provisioning tool built with https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ that I hope both provides great value and also demonstrates the start of a new way to build certain kinds of software.

Thanks for reading!

I've looked briefly into this project before. Some ideas are similar to what I'm doing in https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ but the really weird thing is that I have no idea who's behind this language. A person? A company? A small group? Are they anonymous for some reason or am I oblivious?

I don't generally believe in orchestrators (they miss the point, things are not single computers and neither is the world) and so I have that feedback here but also for:

> Airflow/Cadence/Temporal/Databuilderframework?

Which don't really think about modelling non-centralized things.

This of course doesn't mean they're not useful, it's just that they don't have what I believe is a good long-term value proposition.

I'm incredibly biased because I'm working on programmatic, real-time modelling of distributed systems with https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

The DAG concurrency stuff feels familiar to what I've been doing with our language, mcl. https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Our goal is NOT a general-purpose turing-complete language like this one is, but we do some amazing lock-free, DAG concurrency things to achieve the processing wins.

I don't think it's good news, but why is anyone surprised? Nobody wants to pay for open source.

Companies want it for free, and individuals don't have enough luxury time to be able to do it themselves.

Prove me wrong and help patch or fund https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and you'll have an even better replacement for terraform!

Individual here, not a company. We'd love contributors to https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Eventually decided puppet wasn't a good enough tool to be able to autonomously deploy and continuously manage such clusters. So I started working on this https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ project. Not quite MVP yet, but trying to get there soon. Got distracted along the way with having to work real jobs (Red Hat, Amazon) to pay bills.

Yeah, that project is pretty much at the bottom of my list, unfortunately. My top projects these days are mgmt, klister, recursion-schemes, and hint... And that's already too much!

There are certainly faster alternatives out there (mgmt comes to mind) but then, they're not Ansible.