Joke tech projects pop up all the time. Some, like the lamentable titstare, should never have seen the light of day. Others, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facemash start out as a joke and grow into something that is anything but. Most come and go without anyone really noticing.
Whilst their lives are typically short we often learn more from people’s reactions to these projects than we do from their use of them. An excellent example of this popped up recently when a couple of frustrated Chef and Ansible users came up with a simple configuration management alternative, the regrettably named F***ing Shell Scripts (FSS). As they explain it, as in “Why can’t we just use f***ing shell scripts?”.
Whilst usability issues with configuration management tools – particularly in the Enterprise – is a topic close to my heart, I would not normally have had much more than a passing interest in FSS. What grabbed my attention was the reaction it elicited when posted to Hacker News. With over 150 comments FSS clearly touched a nerve.
Now to clarify, the authors of the project were quite definitive in assuring the mob that they had created FSS as a joke:
We wrote it literally in an afternoon, and were giggling like schoolgirls the whole time.
People either missed this, or chose to ignore it:
“This is simply brilliant! I’ve dreamt about such tools.”
– artellectual
“I’d love to see a tool like yours be brought to full maturity, then I think I’d love to use it.”
– sdegutis
It provided a perfect platform for many to voice their frustrations with current tools:
“Even for an experienced sysadmin, using Puppet and Chef to do even a trivial project (replacing a ~10 line shell script) took a painful couple of days.”
– mattjaynes
“In my experience, there’s a huge amount of work involved in just getting Ansible (and other CM systems) to work right in the first place”
– s_kilk
“We’re using Chef right now, and evaluating other options. They seem to either be between way too over-engineered, or not flexible enough, but nowhere in between.”
– sdegutis
“Keep it simple. puppet/chef have horrendous DSL’s that make it really complicated to reason about.”
– sp1982
In the interest of balance I should point out that there were some voices of support amongst the crowd. Ansible in particular won praise for the effort its team has put into simplifying things.
Overall though I was still blown away with the level of frustration being expressed. Automation tools have been around for years now; CFEngine, the grandfather of the modern tools was created in 1993. Despite this, a tongue in cheek project suggesting ditching them all in favor of the technology they set out to replace (or at least abstract away), shell scripts, is considered credible. For me this is akin to people ditching virtualization for physical boxes. It just doesn’t make sense.
Unless of course something is still fundamentally broken in the approach the current set of tools is taking; that they are still too hard; that they still fail to address key prerequisites like visibility and accountability. I believe that this is the case because I’ve experienced it first hand; I’ve seen it a hundred times in businesses I’ve talked to, and threads like the Hacker News one mentioned above leave little room for alternative interpretations. Heck, we’ve based our product GuardRail on this entire premise; these are not empty words on my part.
Incremental improvements such as those offered by Ansible are a good thing, but what people seem to be searching for is a step change. As things stand this is less likely to come from the current batch of tools, and far more likely to come in the form of a new approach. Docker anyone?