On 17/09/2014 09:07, Tomas Mozes wrote: > On 2014-09-16 22:43, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> Anyone here used ansible and at least one of puppet/chef? >> >> What are your thoughts? >> >> I've made several attempts over the years to get puppet going but never >> really got it off the ground. Chef I stay away from (likely due to the >> first demo of it I saw and how badly that went....) >> >> Puppet seems to me a good product for a large site with 1000 hosts. >> Not so much for ~20 or so. Plus puppet's language and configs get large >> and hard to keep track of - lots and lots of directory trees with many >> things mentioning other things. (Nagios has the same problem if you >> start keeping host, services, groups and commands in many different >> files) >> >> I've stumbled upon ansible, it seems much better than puppet for >> smallish sites with good odds I might even keep the whole thing in my >> head at any one time :-) >> >> Anyone care to share experiences? > > We use ansible. > > I like it because you don't need any agents to install, just the ssh > keys and python, which is mandatory on gentoo anyway. We use a > minimalistic script that bootstraps machines (xen-domU) and then > everything else is configured via ansible. Since version 1.6 there is > the portage module to install software and you can do pretty stuff with > replace/lineinfile/template/copy modules. > > The roles are a good way of keeping your systems equal. We have a common > role for all gentoo machines, then roles specific for dom0 and domU > machines and then the actual roles of a project (project-app for > application server of a project). You can even more abstract it to have > a common application server or a common database, but since you can > include other playbooks, we don't use it that way (also to not get lost > in too many levels of abstractions). > > For upgrades you either write precise playbooks (for example, before you > used a specific "testing" package and now you want a newer "testing" > one) where you delete the previous package.accept_keywords line and > insert the new one. Or by having a small number of servers it's often > faster by clusterssh.
That's almost exactly the same setup I have in mind. How complex do the playbooks get in real-life? -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
