points by lrvick 4 days ago | 0 comments
Sure for bulk storage, but at least as of a few years ago Apple controls a lot of their own metal for the trusted backbone. I would not be shocked if they are crazy enough to manage GCP with puppet too.
[–] bradknowles 4 days ago
[–] lrvick 4 days ago
Jenkins. Wow. I thought Puppet was the worst of it.
Thank you for having the balls to admit this in public.
Hopefully others can stop putting Apple on a pedestal as some gold standard for high accountability and rigorous security.
[–] bradknowles 3 days ago
You know, Puppet isn’t a massively bad solution, if you’re managing your own hardware. I’ve done Puppet before. IMO, Chef is better, but Puppet still works reasonably well.
And for that matter, if you’re running your own CI/CD solution, Jenkins isn’t that bad, either.
Also mind that this work was done about a decade ago, and Puppet and Jenkins were newer and shinier tools back then.
Now, if you can operate in the cloud, then I can point you at solutions that I think are better — depending one which cloud you’re in, and what tools are natively available there. But on-premise hasn’t changed all that much in a decade.
Think of it as a predecessor to Facebook, plus whatever training platform you like. One of these guys wrote a complete software simulator for the iPod Touch-based device they were using in all the stores to handle point-of-sale transactions, so that he could include that in the training.
Content was created on macOS. Content was consumed on iPhones and iPads. The backend servers ran on Linux. It was my job to get all that compiling on the Jenkins server sitting under my desk, instead of on their laptops. I had to make minor changes to each of those code bases to get that to work.
Their build processes were quite advanced for the times. Thousands and thousands of regression tests. Thousands of UI conformance tests.
Then I had to get that Jenkins server up and running on the in-house VMware based cloud they had, where they sucked up their entire last two runs of rackmount xserve hardware and turned it around for their own internal use.
I was given a VM and remote access, and then that was that. My job was done. My contract was over, and I moved back to Austin. But that was a few years ago.