You’re not alone. It’s super frustrating when things don’t work and you have to search through 4 apps to figure out what is wrong. This architecture makes the whole setup brittle.
Fortunately, there are all in one alternatives to the arr stack. I found a couple, but I think Cinephage is the most mature.
Well, we can certainly agree to disagree. I’m not oblivious to having a blind spot here and there. In fact, I very much enjoyed our discussion here, and your perspective. It almost feels like a 2000s era forum discussion, before all the sour people got access to the internet. So thanks, and get well soon!
Thanks for your reply. I get the pros you mention, and auditing is more relevant for bigger shops than smaller ones of course.
Your remark on peer review reminds me of a situation where I had to change a database scheme. So that’s in a database project, and I have to do a PR on that. Now I can’t deploy it because argocd won’t allow me to manually scale down the pods of our application, and I need the database to be idle. It will revert to the defined state, so I’m unable to update without also doing a second PR on the infrastructure yaml. Then after the update I have to reverse the situation again and do a third PR.
So now I’m waiting for two approvals, and I haven’t even touched any code yet. It just seems like so much overhead for doing something that used to take two minutes. I think this is a question of trust and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to trust everyone. That’s why small shops can get a lot more done in less time.
I get CLI users, sometimes using the cli is faster and more efficient.
However I have had frequent discussions with people (all of them also avid CLI users) that set up infrastructure as code. I prefer the super understandable Gui of a tool like octopus deploy over hundreds of yaml files whose content can only be understood by doing a year long deep dive any day.
They always use the same two arguments: Infrastructure as code allows you to rebuild your entire software deployment from scratch, and the code can be versioned, thereby providing an audit trail for deployments.
In decades of software development I have exactly had to redeploy an entire network from scratch 0 times. If you’re in that stage the cause is most likely hardware and re-provisioning that will probably take the bulk of your time.
About the versioning: I’m not arguing against storing deployments as yaml files, but writing them by hand is insanely inefficient. There should be a nice GUI that generates and writes these yaml files, so you don’t have to know every option an value and every validation rule by heart.
Also, I am relatively certain that a tool like octopus deploy also has auditing of who deployed what software in which location.
Oh thanks, I hadn’t even noticed that. I did some research into *arr alternatives a few weeks ago. I found 3 and this one looked like it had the most features. I will look up the other two contenders again then.