Give me Terraform (as much as I hate it) any day.
Terraform sure is a quirky little DSL ain’t it? It’s so weirdly verbose.
But at the same time I can create some azure function app, setup my GitHub build pipeline, get auth0 happy and in theory hook up parts of stripe all in one system. All those random diverse API’s plumbed together and somehow it manages to work.
But boy howdy is that language weird.
All of CDK does things in cloudformation, which made the whole thing stillborn as far as I’m concerned.
The CDK team goes to some lengths to make it better, but it’s all lambda based kludges.
I don't care about powerful. That's the opposite of what I want. I could just use k8s if I cared about that.
I think GP's point was that Kamal has all of these things already, so you don't have to set them up.
It’s stuff like this that’s just a thousand papercuts that dissuades me from using these “simpler” tools. By the time you’ve rebuilt by hand what you need, you’ve just created a worse version of the “more complex” solution.
I get it if your workload is so simple ir low requirement that zero-downtime deploys, rollbacks, health/liveness, automatic volumes, monitoring etc are features you don’t want or need, but “it’s just as good, just DIY all the things” doesn’t make it a viable alternative in my mind.
Why is this better then Ansible + Docker Compose?
Anyone using CDK should switch to Pulumi though.
We've gone through a lot of pain to get this blueprint working since our AWS costs were getting out of hand but we didn't want to part ways with CDK.
We've now got the same stack structure going with Pulumi and Digital ocean, having the same ease of development with at least 60% cost reduction.
It’s not a drop in replacement. It might be worth it depending on what you’re doing.
The alternative, which I feel is far too common (and I say this as someone who directly benefits from it): You choose AWS because it's a "Safe" choice and your incubator gets you a bunch of free credits for a year or two. You pay nothing for compute for the first year, but instead pay a devops guy a bunch to do all the setup - In the end it's about a wash because you have to pay a devops guy to handle your CI and deploy anyway, you're just paying a little more in the latter.
I won't touch DO after they took my droplet offline for 3 hours because I got DDoS'd by someone that was upset that I banned them from an IRC channel for spamming N-bombs and other racial slurs.