Decommissioning Otto

Does anybody _actually_ use the HashiCorp stack, besides Vagrant, for serious work? I tried and honestly found their products sorely, sorely lacking. Very shiny documentation, very incomplete, un-battled-tested tools, no examples given, little response from their devs other than the PR team.<p>For a small example, I _still_ get +1 notifications on this critical issue nearly every day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;packer&#x2F;issues&#x2F;409" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;packer&#x2F;issues&#x2F;409</a> - no response from dev team whatsoever.

<p><pre><code> Otto, the successor to Vagrant 772 points agonzalezro a year ago 177 comments (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;otto.html) </code></pre> Me at the time: Are you kidding?!<p>Me now: Oh, I even forgot about that, the world of software engineering isn&#x27;t always insane after all, I should lighten up ...

They did a good job at trying something, it didn&#x27;t work as expected and they were honest and decided to focus on something else. Those are all very good qualities. I think that&#x27;s commendable.

It&#x27;s too bad (and uncharacteristic of mitchellh) that this post is so light on specifics. Were the &quot;previously unknown challenges&quot; simply that not enough people adopted Otto? Or were there actual technical hurdles?<p>The premise of Otto isn&#x27;t clearly flawed, so it would be interesting to see specific challenges - even if it&#x27;s just &quot;the problem space is way too big and not enough people wanted it&quot;

Kudos to HashiCorp for realizing that the complexity of the project was getting away from them and for having the guts to pull the plug in such a public way.

Question for mitchellh or others at Hashicorp:<p>Will &quot;zero configuration&quot; be a feature&#x2F;goal in your next attempts at this abstraction? Was this one of the things that made building Otto so challenging?<p>A few months ago when I tried Otto I found the &quot;zero configuration&quot; idea off-putting. In fact, I couldn&#x27;t even get a basic Python app to work because there was no way for me to install libmysqlclient[0]. There really was no way to configure anything in Otto.<p>FWIW, we ended up using Convox[1] and loved it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:9QfCNXO52GsJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;otto&#x2F;issues&#x2F;400+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:9QfCNX...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;convox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;convox.com&#x2F;</a>

I still use Vagrant every day. It&#x27;s great for keeping separate projects really truly separated.

Considering the &quot;progress&quot; they were making, and the very lofty goals, this was expected.

Anybody using vault ?