
Clutch, the Open-Source Platform for Infrastructure Tooling - jbredeche
https://eng.lyft.com/announcing-clutch-the-open-source-platform-for-infrastructure-tooling-143d00de9713
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SomaticPirate
With this and Backstage it looks like there is a real need for a single pane
of glass across an organization's infrastructure. From both a GUI perspective
and an API perspective.

It looks like it would aid in more self-service and keep users away from cloud
console's.

The workflow engine looks the most powerful since it would allow for a way to
avoid fat fingering common manual changes.

Sad that it doesn't seem to offer any deployment visibility options. I would
love to connect it to our CI/CD system to see what changes are currently being
rolled out.

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disposedtrolley
Yeah definitely. A major pain point I've experienced recently is trying to
figure out how to stand up various pieces of infrastructure needed to deploy
my app at my company.

There's the k8s manifest, Cloudbuild config, various operators for databases,
a CloudFormation repo for AWS resources, another one for Datadog config etc.
It all feels very disjointed.

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ohgodplsno
You need none of that, and a single thick server on Debian will cover all your
needs.

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starfallg
Monolithic architectures are more performant generally. That's the reason why
we fly in giant aluminium tubes rather than by dangling off a flock of bird-
sized drones.

~~~
bregma
Ah, efficiency vs. aesthetics is truly a perennial battle.

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sandGorgon
Do the problem spaces of Clutch and Terraform overlap ?

I'm not entirely sure what problem does Clutch solve that is not solvable
using Terraform

~~~
kiney
Looks like it has more "self service" capabilities. But not sure. But i think
most of the problems are better solved by running an IaC tool like terraform
in CI with a pull-request workflow.

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onefuncman
terraform forces you to write custom providers instead of letting you glue
tools together. cloudformation has the same issue with custom resources,
though the abstraction is better since you can write custom resources in
whatever language you want.

neither of them solve for CI or pull request workflows themselves, so people
try to bridge the gap with Jenkins and now the frankenstein monster comes to
life -- now you've got golang, groovy, yaml, none of which your product devs
generally have any familiarity with, let alone the idiosyncrasies of terraform
state management, cloudformation stacks stuck in ROLLBACK_COMPLETE, yaml
whitespace sensitivity, Jenkins scripting sandbox woes, troubleshooting from
logs without being able to step through a debugger in an IDE, errors that only
happen in eu-west-3, etc, etc...

Clutch looks great!

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rattray
I have to say, this looks potentially awesome.

I previously worked at Stripe, where we had something vaguely similar; a UI
for managing deploys, infra changes, etc. All a thin wrapper around a CLI we
could also use, plus some niceties like embedded monitoring. I'm going to
really miss that tool the next time I build my own web service.

It really helped product engineers make changes to production with speed,
confidence, and safety.

Before, doing so was a combination of yaml config changes, a smattering of in-
house and third-party CLI's, and sometimes complex combinations thereof. You
could do it, and we did all the time, but it was less discoverable, slower,
and more prone to error.

I'll be curious to see if Clutch is something that proves easy for other orgs
to adopt to their needs.

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gtirloni
Is this something a small team could use? It seems to require significant
customization.

~~~
simtel20
Trying it out today, and the existing features work. It could use some polish,
And a lot more modules. But so far my experience here is similar to my
experience with envoy. The maintainers are engaged, helpful and very nice.
Questions are answered and easy issues fixed as we speak.

The real promising part is how this is made to be extended. It seems like a
self-service ops API built around protobufs which is a good starting point.

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0xEFF
> There is a popular continuous delivery platform that addresses many of the
> same overarching issues as Clutch (e.g., lowering MTTR, user-friendly UI).
> However, it requires significant investment in running many microservices
> and migrating applications to a structure different from our own.

Any idea which one?

Edit: I assume Backastage as it’s the first listed on the linked comparison
page.

~~~
zeisss
There is a comparison page which names a few:
[https://clutch.sh/docs/about/comparison](https://clutch.sh/docs/about/comparison)

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VectorLock
I've been trying to do something similar with a less complex approach using
incremental automation scripts and creating an operational meta database, then
do some light integrations (a Grafana datasource that can use the ops metabase
to use information in templated dashboards)

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ckdarby
I think this is a new model of job security?

It generally looks like:

\- Go to company with major growth

\- Tackle a problem they face

\- Leverage company resources to build a open source solution

\- Sell management on all the benefits of open source

\- (Optional) Wait for stock to fully vest

\- Create consulting services company for the tool you built

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rattray
That... sounds good? Like, good for everybody involved?

This plan won't work if management doesn't agree that you're solving a
valuable problem, and also won't work if other companies don't view the
problem you're solving as valuable.

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euske
Can anyone explain what is infrastructure tooling in laypeople (or
layprogrammer)'s term?

~~~
0xEFF
If a software company is like an automotive company the infrastructure tooling
is like the factory.

Comparison isn’t perfect but it’s usually good enough.

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whydoyoucare
I think a more accurate comparison would be the assembly line of the factory
that allows push-button-combination-of-parts-to-build-a-motorcar.
Infrastructuree tooling allows push-button-combination-of-application-
component-stack-to-deploy-the-functioning-software-application.

