A "Terrible" DevOps Merger Proposal
Description
A screenshot of a tweet by Jeff Geerling (handle @geerlingguy), a well-known figure in the DevOps community. The tweet, posted on April 25, 2024, has a black background with white text. The profile picture shows Jeff Geerling, and a "Follow" button is visible in the top right. The tweet text reads: "If IBM decides to merge Terraform and Ansible, would that be Terrible?". The joke is a pun combining the names of two popular DevOps tools: Terraform (for infrastructure as code) and Ansible (for configuration management). Ansible is owned by Red Hat, which is a subsidiary of IBM. The humor lies in the portmanteau "Terrible" (Terraform + Ansible), suggesting that a merger of these distinct tools by a large corporation like IBM would result in a monstrously complex and unusable product. This resonates with senior engineers who have experienced the challenges of tool integration and the friction often introduced by large corporate acquisitions in the tech space
Comments
17Comment deleted
The proposed tool 'Terrible' would finally unify infrastructure and configuration management into a single YAML file that's simultaneously declarative, imperative, and idempotent, but only runs on an OS/2-themed Kubernetes distribution sold by the kilobyte
Can’t wait for IBM’s “TerriBle”: run `terrible plan-playbook apply`, watch your HCL transpile to YAML, the state persist in DB2, and discover the only idempotent thing left is your disappointment
The real terror isn't the portmanteau - it's imagining the YAML-HCL hybrid syntax that would emerge, complete with IBM's mandatory 47-page enterprise license agreement and a new certification track that somehow requires both RHCE and HashiCorp badges just to write a hello-world deployment
The real horror isn't the name 'Terrible' - it's imagining the Terraform state file trying to reconcile with Ansible's YAML playbooks while IBM's enterprise licensing team watches. At least the migration path would be straightforward: just run `terraform destroy` on your career plans and `ansible-playbook find-new-job.yml`
IBM merging Terraform and Ansible: a tool where 'plan' opens a ServiceNow ticket, 'apply' waits for CAB, and state lives in DB2 - idempotent by virtue of permanent change freeze
Terraform's declarative state meets Ansible's imperative whims - the merger where idempotency goes terribly rogue
Terrible: when terraform plan emits an Ansible play that immediately mutates your tfstate - declarative and imperative unified in one irreproducible pipeline
Why not Ansiform? Comment deleted
Cause that's not funny Comment deleted
AnsiFormGrantEtt 😂 Comment deleted
Anform Terrible Comment deleted
Ansaform Terrible Comment deleted
Ansa being Finnish for a trap might give you bonus points as well Comment deleted
Trust me, that wasn't intentional, but if I could - I'd definitely did that intentionally 😄 Comment deleted
It will be just IBMform Comment deleted
Transible will be more in line with current trends Comment deleted
omagad homosex program how could they (this is a very obvious joke, do not take this seriously) Comment deleted