As most are aware, I created the widely used Hiera system in Puppet. I introduced it in 2011, and it has since become essentially the only way to use Puppet in any meaningful fashion. Given its widespread adoption, I donated the code to Puppet, and it became integrated with Puppet core.
Unfortunately, during this integration we lost some key values—the command line and the ability to use it in scripts and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, our world is changing, and we are ever more focussing on small, single purpose compute. I intend to create a new kind of Configuration Management system that is focussed on the small, single, purpose needs. Filling the gap that has always existed - how to manage our applications rather than systems, an area Puppet has always been weak at.
There is then still the need for hierarchical data and given that I have the flexibility to start completely fresh I am at best taking some inspiration from Hiera.
So today I’ll introduce a new tool called Choria Hierarchical Data - current code name tinyhiera but that might change.
Read on for the details
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