14 comments

  • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 55 minutes ago
    I was hoping I was the DevOps/Platform/SRE plugin for my agents!
    • hangrybear666 52 minutes ago
      Humor is what keeps me going too lol
  • jablongo 44 minutes ago
    Why do you need a plug-in for this? You can just ask the agents to do all this stuff and it works fine in my experience.
    • bealesh 26 minutes ago
      dig into the repo and you'll find libraries of opentofu that are quite opinionated - the point of the plugin is to inject opinions that the agents don't have.
    • jablongo 44 minutes ago
      I guess it makes the behavior more predictable?
    • measurablefunc 43 minutes ago
      Plugins are just a collection of prompts & shell scripts.
  • cousinbryce 2 hours ago
    Can this be used with the ponytail skill? https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/tree/main
    • bealesh 2 hours ago
      It should be compatible yeah - ponytail was the inspiration for this - ideally one could use ponytail for application code and neckbeard for infra.
      • shermantanktop 1 hour ago
        Also:

        suspenders, for resilience

        unixbeard, for documentation

        roundglasses, for observation

        dnd, for chaos testing

  • hangrybear666 2 hours ago
    It does sound cool and as an infra nerd myself it reads sensible, I just don't see why I would want another abstraction layer between my cloud deployments being rolled out and the tf/hcl files that I maintain. Why would I want to install another interface between me, the planfile and the running environment? Genuine question
    • bealesh 2 hours ago
      It’s opinionated and built around a reference architecture- think it kind of like using rails or phoenix instead of just writing ruby or elixir. LLM’s are fantastic syntax generators, but they have no real opinions on architecture or finops.
      • hangrybear666 1 hour ago
        Oh so more an orchestration interface with sane defaults for an LLM to use as a reference when implementing deployment changes, especially new rollouts? It seems to be aimed at small to medium sized cloud deployments and more as a starting point to get customers up and running?

        Because I'm already administratrating a large AWS environment and the networking, especially as regards route tables, transit gateways, DMZs and extensive security group rules managed in multiple distinct layers across teams (and don't even get me started on IAM and Active Directory Forest) don't seem to fit into the abstraction layer I'm seeing.

        • bealesh 1 hour ago
          Exactly - and it's pretty much aimed at 'built this cool TS app on vercel and supabase and want to scale it' or the like. I build my career migrating rails apps off heroku, and this is kind of inspired by a lot of what I learned.

          Are you using IaC to administer all of this or just handjamming in the console? I'd love to expand neckbeard to handle more complex enterprise motions - the landing zone scenario your speaking of is particularly an interesting use case, I'll start thinking on it!

          • hangrybear666 1 hour ago
            Oh that's neat. Yeah I got started on heroku too. Fly.io also comes to mind.

            We run our own gitlab instance in a central AWS account that has some infra buckets containing modularized Terraform packaged into tarballs that are then fanned out to a couple hundred aws accounts across the teams and environments (prod, qual, dev).

            Its all deployed via gitlab ci cd pipelines (which are just ec2 instances spawned at pipeline invocation) in multiple layers. The first layer is a foundation laying the networking rules and the IAM roles, permissions, policies and boundaries, some logging and monitoring. The second layer then assigns team specifics such as budget and maps people's accounts to roles depending on their access level (maintainer, developer, reporter). This layer can also be used to customize firewall rules like opening ports to the company internal IP ranges. The third and final layer is then all of the application infrastructure of the teams, so all their persistence, compute, load balancing, dns routing and serverless stuff. My prior teammates did a lot by hand in the aws console but I told them to stop and retain everything as IaC code. Besides Terraform, in my team we use Packer to build reusable "golden" machine images but also Ansible to configure live machines.

            I'm still surprised nobody bothered us to change to Opentofu, it's not even been mentioned yet lol.

            • bealesh 29 minutes ago
              I've worked in similar shops - I'm a big fan of less pipelines and layers and more environment variables.
  • manlymuppet 1 hour ago
    The real Gilfoyle would self-host.
    • bealesh 1 hour ago
      do as neckbeard says, not as neckbeard does.
  • piterrro 1 hour ago
    > The same reference app (HTTP service + worker + cron + Postgres), smallest tier, all three environments, live prices via Infracost:

    Hetnzer server for 25usd/month and you have plenty more space to do more stuff and scale

    • bealesh 57 minutes ago
      Hetnzer is next on my list to add! Feel free to PR it if you're feeling froggy!
      • hangrybear666 40 minutes ago
        Hetzner is awesome, I prefer it to aws for personal projects, feel free to analyze my modularized instance setup with an LLM and rip out what you need, it's all hand built, most of the engineering went into cloud-init and network security - before machines could generate the same in hours lul

        https://github.com/fiscalismia/fiscalismia-infrastructure/tr...

        • bealesh 28 minutes ago
          killer! will take a look - I need a digital ocean alternative.
    • ZeWaka 1 hour ago
      Yep. I run a lot of stuff of my local datacenter $6/mo hetzner VPS.
  • llama052 49 minutes ago
    This seems like a great way to wake up and have your cloud spend skyrocket because an LLM assumed wrong.
    • bealesh 44 minutes ago
      did you read the part where it doesn't let the LLM do that?
  • janwirth 2 hours ago
    Why not opentofu and ansible? Version and run it. I don’t see why i need this.
    • bealesh 2 hours ago
      If you write your own tofu and use ansible you probably don’t - this is aimed more at containers/serverless.
  • benatkin 21 minutes ago
    The guy in the image doesn't look very euphoric, not even in a subtle way. Sorry, not the neckbeard plugin I was looking for. Mine must be influenced by aalewis.
  • Stitch4223 2 hours ago
    Sometimes the name of a product makes me want to use it, even if I don’t have uses for it. This is such a name, I just keep on grinning.
    • bealesh 2 hours ago
      This makes my day - I genuinely love naming things, as an artist and a technologist it's fun to inject some creativity into the code!
    • dboreham 1 hour ago
      The beard is the wrong color, but otherwise: agree.
    • manlymuppet 1 hour ago
      I have the opposite feeling about CoackroachDB. Great database, but man, what a terrible name.
  • zshn 2 hours ago
    Something to try for sure. Company recently migrated some ancient on prem databases to AWS, would've been useful then perhaps.
    • bealesh 2 hours ago
      Thanks! Give it a try next time you need to provision infra.
  • luckydata 1 hour ago
    the readme is cringe and painful to read. please take a minute to tone the claudisms down.
    • bealesh 1 hour ago
      definitely on my todo list - I was educated in the American south so you might regret this!
      • shagie 1 minute ago
        [delayed]
      • luckydata 1 hour ago
        I doubt it, bad grammar is better than AI-speak.
        • bealesh 57 minutes ago
          we southerners prefer 'colorful' or 'alternative' grammar :)
  • jack324 1 hour ago
    [flagged]