> I remember thinking that setting up a new VPS would be trivial since I was using Puppet (or whatever at that time) but just about every service depended on some feature that was (no longer) specified in my configs so I needed to fix my configs as I deployed the new VPS.
Having worked with puppet for a long time, I can relate.
There is this false sense of confidence that everything is reproducible "because we had the discipline to never do manual changes and always use puppet" but in real life:
- dependencies between resources are forgotten, it worked the first time because luck in the order in which resources were applied, but would fail in from scratch applies.
- hidden dependencies that were not specified but it worked because an other resource was installed at the time.
- hell, even a failed apply could have partially installed dependencies that would make subsequent applied work.
- there's always _that time_ when you had to fix something in a hurry and manually installed a package which is now a potential hidden dependency for everything else.
Having worked with puppet for a long time, I can relate. There is this false sense of confidence that everything is reproducible "because we had the discipline to never do manual changes and always use puppet" but in real life:
- dependencies between resources are forgotten, it worked the first time because luck in the order in which resources were applied, but would fail in from scratch applies.
- hidden dependencies that were not specified but it worked because an other resource was installed at the time.
- hell, even a failed apply could have partially installed dependencies that would make subsequent applied work.
- there's always _that time_ when you had to fix something in a hurry and manually installed a package which is now a potential hidden dependency for everything else.