It's sad that we go from bash ---> massive enterprisey system. There's nothing in between.

I ran into this at my work. We have ansible and salt and terraform and nomad and spinnaker and kubernetes and docker, each in varying states of favor/disfavor.

Bash scripts are awful: no standard library, no functional ide for debugging, pathetic language, whitespace sensitive. The only saving grace is the universality.

Everything else? Heavyweight servers, daemons, opinions through the wazoo.

What did I want? I want a way to get an inventory/list/cluster map of nodes, then be able to send CLI commands to them, and the parse the response and send more. I want to a decent language, good runtime, IDE/modern toolchain support.

Can I just ssh into boxes? Yeah, uh, kinda? Or maybe I use aws-ssm to send/receive commands. Or kubectl or dockerrun. Or teleport. Or salt daemon. Each of them can do the job of "send command to a node".

And I want to write meta-applications on top of that.

So I settled on groovy: optional typing, if I want near-full JVM speed I can use CompileStatic, lots of scriptability, full JVM parallelism/threading power. The JVM sucks in some ways at running CLI commands locally, but once I figured that monstrosity out, got Jsch working for "pure" java SSH, caching kinda solved, thing....

So after about six rewrites, and a sufficient amount of configuration that makes a complicated ssh conf look like child's play, I can do cluster-level operations that make me happy: setup clusters, orchestrate/run/track load tests, fully scripted backups and restores, migrations/upgrades, red/black. Restore backups to analysis clusters.

I'm not tied to a specific cloud. I'm not tied to a command delivery substrate.

Is it useful to someone else? Dunno, I'll try to get it released and documented.

Does anyone else know of something like this?