Betamax, Machinefile and a roll of Ducttape

Choosing Convenience over the "Best" Standard

In infrastructure-as-code, the best technical solution does not always win.

Take machine provisioning. Fedora CoreOS's Ignition is engineered better than cloud-init. Ignition runs early in the initramfs before the root filesystem even mounts. It parses strict JSON and fails instantly if a configuration error …