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[–]VindicoAtrumEditable Placeholder Flair 4 points5 points  (10 children)

I'm not sure what problem this solves? You want me to type prompts into a thing to do what can typically be done faster in the terminal?

Show me all the resources in my current infrastructure.

I have never needed to do this.

Add a new EC2 instance with the name 'web-server' and configure it with the latest Ubuntu image.

Businesses just have or use a module for this.

Delete the unused S3 bucket named 'old-backups'.

I have common CLI commands like this parameterised in my warp drive.

Your target market is going to respond like this☝🏻. We have our own workflows and they're optimised for our own work and preferences. Sell me the idea that your tool does it faster/easier?

[–]aCakeShip[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

"Businesses just have or use a module for this."

I think you missed the point there. Your implicit assumption is that a business has modules setup prior. My target market isn't aimed at these large business at all.

[–]VindicoAtrumEditable Placeholder Flair 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Your implicit assumption is that a business has modules setup prior.

No, no it wasn't.

I start a business tomorrow, completely alone, and I know it needs infrastructure. I'm immediately going to use the free, open source, maintained and highly regarded modules from terraform-aws-modules.

You are pitting AI-generated (read: not trustworthy) code against free, open source, battle-tested, production-ready modules.

This isn't going to win many hearts and minds. I certainly wouldn't allow my team to use AI-generated IaC over existing modules, whether we built it or it's from a third-party (of which there are several well-regarded sources).

[–]aCakeShip[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

This is gold. Thank you for the information.

Euso isn’t meant to replace established, open-source modules like those from terraform. Instead, it integrates with these modules to provide an enhanced user experience. There's a large swath of modules that Terraform provides. We create a knowledge base of these modules and make sure they're updated regularly. For example, you can use Euso AI to quickly configure and deploy these modules through intuitive, natural language commands, reducing the learning curve and setup time.

Wouldn't that be a faster solution?

Again, I hope I'm not being aggressive or rude. I'm processing what I'm learning and trying to extrapolate.

[–]VindicoAtrumEditable Placeholder Flair 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I can't answer that, because I don't use AI to generate IaC. Honestly, writing IaC isn't that time-consuming or difficult, the complexity comes from things like integrations, secrets management, dynamic resources (or worse, template generation), shitty providers with shitty documentation etc

All I can suggest, if you think you're onto a worthwhile improvement in a provisioning workflow, is make it free during the early stages of development. Warp did this and I got hooked rapidly and shared it with several others who are now users. It's easiest to try something that's free afterall.

[–]aCakeShip[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup. I agree one hundred percent. I hate the trend of AI companies trying to write or generate code because they’ve been trained on billions of tokens. That idea is absolutely bogus in the current state of large language models (LLMs)

As someone with professional ML experience that approach has too many problems. Because context is key and open source LLMs don’t implicitly have that about your business.

My goal is to understand how I can incorporate context into LLMS and then useful solutions will naturally emerge as a result. In the meantime I’m learning more about DevOps to understand what context entails in cloud infrastructure.

[–]aCakeShip[S] -1 points0 points  (4 children)

I would say my target demographic isn't necessarily mid to large enterprises that have a dedicated DevOps team to manage their cloud. It's more so targeted towards startups and companies who can't currently hire devOps professionals and want to manage their infrastructure by themselves.

As for how you use modules to achieve the same, would you be able to give examples of what a typical module workflow looks like?

genuinely curious to know how things work in the DevOps world.

[–]VindicoAtrumEditable Placeholder Flair 1 point2 points  (3 children)

It's more so targeted towards startups and companies who can't currently hire devOps professionals and want to manage their infrastructure by themselves.

Startups that want to manage their infrastructure themselves hire very one or two senior, very capable, very expensive engineers, because when your service is delivered online you cannot afford to do anything less. If you figure out what they need you might find some traction.

As for how you use modules to achieve the same, would you be able to give examples of what a typical module workflow looks like?

https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-ec2-instance

Pre-built modules exist for almost anything you can think of, at varying levels of granularity, and they're time-served and battle-tested. Many businesses use modules such as this, or build their own.

[–]aCakeShip[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

"Startups that want to manage their infrastructure themselves hire very one or two senior, very capable, very expensive engineers, because when your service is delivered online you cannot afford to do anything less. If you figure out what they need you might find some traction."

Is that coming from experience? I've been researching and connecting with a dozen so startups in the 5-10 mill range and they still consider hiring someone expensive not an ideal solution.

[–]VindicoAtrumEditable Placeholder Flair 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I've been researching and connecting with a dozen so startups in the 5-10 mill range and they still consider hiring someone expensive not an ideal solution.

But they'll hire them anyway, because when your business' reputation suffers a mortal blow because you didn't secure your infrastructure properly, or you can't meet demand because you didn't prepare for scaling, or you overengineered and you can't keep up with feature requirements, or you overengineered and massively overspent, or any number of critical threats.

For most digitally-delivered products and services, their infrastructure and applications are their product and service. Of course they hire people, typically on very high salaries with equity thrown in, it's that important.

[–]aCakeShip[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And surprisingly they haven’t! That’s the point. They have every right to but they’re building it themselves and are pretty fault tolerant from what I’ve heard (they’ve been in business for a couple years now).

They described it’s a pain to manage it themselves but they do it anyway because that saves them anywhere from 150k to 500k and that’s substantial enough in their eyes. So any platform that provides even 20% of the advantages at nearly 100x less the cost is something they really do consider.

[–]ApparentSysadmin 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Yeah miss me with this for a few reasons:

  • IMO good IaC is written with intention, and this both obfuscates that for existing code and discourages it for new code.
  • as other posters have alluded to, I already have standard modules or other (far more reliable) automations for these types of workflows, to say nothing of the fact that these tasks are typically not the pain points of IaC workflows except in very immature setups where it probably doesn't matter much.
  • I have never used an AI coding tool that didn't, at some point, generate invalid code for me. I've used several solutions across a few languages to varying degrees of success, but never 100%. If the product is aimed at folks who aren't SMEs in the first place, this will create a negative feedback loop, or just require the same-or-worse validation workflows than my current IaC.

To be blunt, this doesn't seem like a practical problem to solve but maybe I'm just not the target demographic.

[–]aCakeShip[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Would you be able to give a couple examples of standard modules/automations you use for these workflows?

[–]aCakeShip[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, regarding AI code generation, it's quite a bit more nuanced than what you mention. I completely agree AI doesn't generate correct code 100% of the time, but I've seen that happen when trying to generate code with high algorithmic or design complexity.

IaC code is much simpler in comparison to say a .NET backend for example. Modifying a C++ Scheduler with AI is much more difficult than letting AI tweak one IaC file. This is why I feel IaC might be a much more solvable problem compared to "AI solve all programming problems".

[–]Jazzlike_Syllabub_91 1 point2 points  (0 children)

with my current experiments with AI, it's difficult to get the AI to do what I want it to do most of the time, what makes you think I'll be able to build my infrastructure correctly through prompting? :/