Comments on: Why toppcloud (Silver Lining) will not be agnostic

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:17:57 +0000

Then you probably want Puppet instead of this tool.

By: Jorge Vargas

Jorge Vargas — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:54:37 +0000

I think you are missing the point. The reason of having ubuntu as the distro is not “we love ubuntu” is it works and works great. It’s stable, has enough packages and is well maintained. Is that better than X? maybe, maybe not. The point is that it’s good enough for this system and it’s one less thing to worry about. I will love to plugin nginx as the frontend for static files but that will make the system more complex for everyone at the expense of something I will like to have. That said as Ian pointed out the idea is to have things by consensus if in the future “the best” deployment method for webapps is to run nginx with reverse proxy to tornadoweb, then there is a chance the system will switch to that if everyone involved agrees it’s the best way to go.

By: bjunix

bjunix — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:58:08 +0000

I also love the way ubuntu works, but I try to avoid tools that tie me to a single vendor/distro. And there is more to linux/unix than RHEL and Ubuntu of course.

Fedora for one is another very popular distro. Especially amongst devs as its the base for future RHEL releases/technologies. But than there is also gentoo, debian, suse, mandriva, slackware, arch and also *nixes like FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. Not that I am crying for support for all those distros but I am looking for an abstraction layer to write own backends for them.

By: Jorge Vargas

Jorge Vargas — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:19:39 +0000

I totally agree with that RedHat/CENTOS is horrible for deployment, it’s outdated and “stable” I for once will not have looked at this if it depended on that.

On the other hand I have been using ubuntu and love it because “it just works” So for me toppcloud is the way to change that and make the top deployment tool.

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:47:38 +0000

Admittedly there’s a bit of a “let’s storm operations!” to this; this tool expresses developer sensibilities. Among developers RHEL gets no love. The Python 2.4 thing kind of shows the symmetry: RHEL/CentOS doesn’t seem to love developers either. Ubuntu works well; I’ve heard no claims to the contrary, and have encountered no evidence to the contrary.

As to toppcloud’s widespread use… I’m not sure that matters to me. The only time that will really matter is if some contributor I really value is between a rock and a hard place — in this case, between toppcloud and operations/IT. It’s not impossible that contributor may be me in some future circumstance. But it will be disappointing if the tool is compromised because of organizational/political challenges (not surprising, but disappointing).

By: Dethe Elza

Dethe Elza — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:24:03 +0000

How about Argent Nimbus (silver cloud in Latin, though the conjugation is almost certainly wrong, maybe in Latin-ish). I like the idea of combining metal + cloud. Maybe even heavy metal clouds? Aurum Nimbus. Other people’s clouds have silver linings, our linings are gold.

Best wishes.

By: John Moylan

John Moylan — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:27:55 +0000

Personally, I think sticking with Ubuntu is silly. The last stats I have show RHEL 5 and it’s clones in the lead for live server deployments.

I’m guessing that RHEL/Centos’s default Python 2.4 is a show stopper? RHEL 6 should be out in Q2 or Q3 with 2.6 support. Hopefully Ian or someone else will create a RHEL6 fork.

By: Bjunix

Bjunix — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:42:18 +0000

Thanks for this post and the insight to your design decisions. I think it’s the right way to hardcode as much as possible of the toolchain. But I still have some reservations about Ubuntu as the choice of operating system. And every other fixed operating system would arouse the same reservations.

I mean its a question of where you want to go with toppcloud. Should it be a proof of concept or will it eventually advance to a widely used tool for webapp deployment to cloud environments? I am looking forward to the latter and with this in mind I think the hardcode-everything-stand needs to be softened at least sometime in the future. And in my opinion a fixed operating system, especially if it’s Ubuntu, is a no-go for several reasons.

By: Gerald McCollam

Gerald McCollam — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:22:47 +0000

“toppcloud will hardcode everything it possibly can”

I totally agree and am happy having someone impose sensible defaults. Deployments quickly bloom from ‘it works for me’ to complete unmanageability and wrenchedness.

How bout cumulus, acumulus, cloudless, cloudly … cloudian?

By: Brandon Craig Rhodes

Brandon Craig Rhodes — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:53:31 +0000

No, it was supposed to be a fun comment! Apple is doing something to help out people who want the Internet to “Just Work” without breaking all of the time, and Ian is doing something for us web developers so that we can churn out deployed web apps in what is surely the Python equivalent of the pretty white packaging that Apple is famous for! I should obviously have used some smileys with my comment, and also remembered that some people are angered by the iPad and would think I was saying bad things about toppcloud. So, here are some belated smileys: :-) :-)

I still think Ian should name it pyclad. It sounds like “AllClad” and has a nice, hefty feeling. Like something made of metal.