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   Andy Wingo (wingo@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:03:57 JST Andy Wingo

   make it stop

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:03:57 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     @wingo i still don't understand why one would want kubernetes... like anywhere

     every time i've actually interacted with someone using it, it seemed like a solution in search of a problem

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:09:12 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • medium rare bird

     @migratory @wingo "not doing whatever it is you're doing with kubernetes"

   • Embed this notice
     medium rare bird (migratory@jorts.horse)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:09:13 JST medium rare bird

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @wingo what credible alternative distributed operating systems are out there?

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:28:36 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @migratory @whitequark @wingo build something with #mgmtconfig instead eg: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8vz1MMGkuik

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:28:36 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo oh, interesting! how does it compare to nix?

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:32:37 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory Thank you for sharing that Catherine! And apologies to everyone in advance for our incomplete documentation. Working on it... I'm not a VC funded anything, just a regular human trying as hard as a I can =D

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:32:38 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • medium rare bird

     @migratory here's the actually useful link https://mgmtconfig.com/docs/guide/

   • Embed this notice
     medium rare bird (migratory@jorts.horse)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:32:39 JST medium rare bird

     in reply to

     • James Just James

     @purpleidea possibly the least informative pitch I've ever heard. I'll invest an hour of my life watching this barely-described video immediately

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:38:00 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Can you tell me more about what you're invested in?

     I'm at least optimistic that mgmt solves some problems your stack isn't solving. I don't however know if you want the kind of more advanced problems solved that mgmt aims to be good at. (It can do simple things too.)

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:38:01 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Very good question. I'm not a nix expert, but there is some overlap. Some people actually use the two together.

     Mgmt is actually aiming to solve a larger problem: how do you model and build autonomous distributed systems... Think ansible+terraform, but that can react in "real time" (sub second) and handle day two automation.

     There's no designed in central point of coordination, our mcl language models it all.

     Happy to answer any questions you have.

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:38:01 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo i'd be super interested in a showcase of mgmt+nix; otherwise it feels like there's too much overlap with tech i'm already heavily invested in

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:41:02 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo On this specific point mgmt has a concept of "reversible resources" which means it can "undo" something that was previously done. It does this in ms, and immediately, which is quite neat.

     Not all resources necessarily support this yet, but it's easy to add when we find something new we want reversed.

     One downside is it's not something we use often, so there may be some bugs hiding out.

     But we can do this for distributed systems!

     You might prefer mgmt+nix though.

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:41:03 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo like i just finished migrating off ansible which IMO is unfit for purpose (just like chef and other systems that do not provide 'strong idempotence' in the configuration mgmt sense; ie anything that can leave unused configs or packages on the server)

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:47:38 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo nix! i use it for the core task of "i run one command and after it completes successfully i know exactly what state one individual machine is in"

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:48:00 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo right now when i need to do something on *multiple* machines i use fly.io, which works but also has certain issues. it would be nice to be able to have the same guarantees for "i need to deploy this in 5 places across the planet"

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:53:34 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Based on what you said you appreciate about nix, I would recommend initially trying mgmt for something that you can't currently do well.

     i) Maybe either a distributed systems task

     ii) Perhaps I could show you how to do something that you thought would be too complicated, but with mcl (our language) becomes self-contained and very easy.

     You've shared so much good stuff online with me, I could write you a small mcl module to deploy something as an example perhaps?

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 04:58:53 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo sure! how does deploying a simple go app across multiple machines sound like? let's say i want to have an instance of https://codeberg.org/git-pages/git-pages running in SEA, FRA, and SYD

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:04:43 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Okay! I could build you something if you'd like. One caveat: we currently support two "coordination" backends. (We call it the "world" backend.) The main one is etcd. This is needed if you want things happening on machine A to be influenced by things on machine B.

     We don't really recommend world-scale coordination over etcd, but it would probably work. Eventually we could add an AP (CAP theorem) backend instead of the CP one that etcd has.

     ...continued...

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:06:11 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo I've reviewed etcd recently (which amounts to basically reading the Jepsen report and concluding that most of it seems good) and figured that in context of git-pages I want to store the SSL keys in it (currently I put those in an S3 bucket)

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:07:33 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo there is a need for coordination: namely, actions of one git-pages instance needs to propagate to others. there are two kinds of them:
     - getting an SSL cert (caddy-etcd should handle that)
     - pushing an update to the site (right now i use Tigris, but i am interested in being able to not rely on third party, sometimes unstable and kinda opaque infra)

   • Embed this notice
     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:07:34 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Your request doesn't seem to imply any need to coordinate between the three, so it's not difficult to just run mgmt standalone. Which I can do.

     But maybe you'd like the more fun thing of doing some magic clustering ensuring you have N different copies of it running at a time.

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:07:50 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo oh also in the future i'd want locks for GC but that's a separate thing that's not implemented yet

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:08:28 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo This is a very insightful way of dealing with credentials. We will eventually have natively doing this for you, but it will look like this.

   • Embed this notice
     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:10:25 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Yup, we can do exactly this.

     1) Catherine pushes the new SSL cert to etcd

     2) Within probably around 1 second, every host will have that new SSL cert deployed and running.

     Does that sound acceptable?

     (Modulus etcd <--> machine latency should probably be < 100ms, since that's the default etcd raft timeout... You can change this but we never experimented with that.)

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:12:08 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo the way git-pages works is that it automatically gets SSL certs for any user domain; eg you push a site to purpleidea.grebedoc.dev and it autonomously talks to LE the first time anyone connects to purpleidea.grebedoc.dev:443 (or the same with a custom domain)

     hence the need for a store like etcd

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:14:29 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo take a look at https://grebedoc.dev/ to see how this works in practice! (this is what i'd like to run on my own cluster)

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     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:17:42 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo Gotcha. It might take me a bit of digging to figure it out, but I can probably get at least the rough template there, and it's likely you'll know exactly where I missed the point.

     Are you interested in joining our matrix channel where it might be easier to go back and forth on this or has matrix scarred us all too much? 😅

     I'll try and get some initial code running as a POC.

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:20:54 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • James Just James
     • medium rare bird

     @purpleidea @migratory @wingo sure, matrix works!

   • Embed this notice
     James Just James (purpleidea@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 05:22:05 JST James Just James

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧
     • medium rare bird

     @whitequark @migratory @wingo ping purpleidea in #mgmtconfig:matrix.org please =D

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 10:00:30 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Hailey

     @hailey @wingo yea i can see that

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     Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 10:00:31 JST Hailey

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @wingo like most of these technologies out of big tech its a tool for deskilling labour and increasing labour arbitrage. just imo!

   • Embed this notice
     tef (tef@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 10:06:52 JST tef

     in reply to

     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @wingo

     fwiw i have seen legit usecases, but the majority of them are "we need to deploy some software across a cluster, elastically" and use k8s as the glue to build out a service for on prem

     for cloud stuff i guess it's kinda an extra layer between you and aws/google, but an extra layer with a similar api and consistent tooling

     but honestly it's still overkill, much in the same way we use docker so webdevs can install code as root, without having to do static linking

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 10:32:42 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • tef

     @tef right