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akerl_yesterday at 7:01 PM1 replyview on HN

It feels odd to complain about "tools doing black magic" when the new way is "cloud init, a tool used by a ton of infra platforms" and the old way is "drop a file in this directory and it will somehow get slurped into the right space at the right time".


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aheppyesterday at 7:28 PM

Isn't cloud init just slurping its own config file, then generating the "real" config files and slurping those into the right spaces?

To me, "copies a file named wpa_supplicant.conf from /boot to /etc on first init" is simpler than "parses some yaml, the generates /etc/wpa_supplicant".

Maybe I'd find it worthwhile if I had encountered cloud init years ago before I invested in learning the other 900 linux networking configuration tools, but now it just feels like a case of XKCD 927 (+1 competing standards). If cloud init is even better, it definitely doesn't seem 10x better to be worth the change.

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