On 2/10/2010 1:20 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> Moving beyond the hypothetical, Cfengine is a practical solution to
> practical system administration problems. Why don't you describe some
> actual problems that you are facing and how you think Cfengine can help.
> We'll then be able offer our advice.
I'm looking for a framework to manage ongoing deployments and version
upgrades that keeps control in the right place but reduces what the
hands-on people have to know and the grunge work they do. One example
would be deploying an app that needs config file edits that relate to
the NICs attached to different subnets and server connections to
locally-appropriate targets.
The piece I see as a showstopper is how the operations team would
interact with it. If we have several versions of an in-house
application approved by QA - and we assume the corresponding cfengine
code exists to manage them, what does the person who knows about the
physical machines do to schedule a version update on a particular
machine or group in a certain time window? What ties the piece of the
cfengine configuration that knows about this version of the application
to the application version itself? Can a syntax error when trying to
make this change break things? Is there an audit trail on who made a
particular change? Does cfengine help solve these logistical problems
or just move them and add its own complexity? Or, is the language
sufficiently modular that some wrapper that understands our name/version
conventions could present a list of choices and write the code for the
requested deployment? (I may be headed this direction with or without
subversion as the agent).
Also, is there a mechanism to collate monitoring statistics across a
group of machines in something approaching real time? Because of our
redundancy and fail over strategy it's not unusual for individual
machines to have double their ordinary load, but the metric we need to
track is the aggregate load across the currently active set of machines
providing a service. If every machine's load (connection count, etc.)
doubles at the same time it's a problem but if a few machines/apps are
down, the fact that the load goes up on their counterparts is expected.
--
Les Mikesell
[email protected]
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