On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Jake M <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Tod Hansmann <[email protected]> > Date: July 30, 2014 at 9:07:03 AM > On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 4:37 PM, Jake M <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I’m curious what tools folks are using for systems automation, e.g. > > puppet, chef, salt stack, ansible and the like? What experiences have you > > had? > > > > > At my old job we were using ansible and salt in various places (mostly > experimenting). I can't stand puppet and chef, bloated pieces of hell that > they are. > > -Tod Hansmann > > > I’m kinda falling in love with ansible but want to play with salt. Did you > come to a conclusion of which you preferred? >
I prefer Salt. I say this because it has a lot more technical quality. Ansible is simplistic and a bit more straightforward, but Salt is flexible and performant in ways Ansible just won't approach. That said, not all is sunshine and roses with Salt. Their documentation is very hard to consume and learn from and getting into it is a mess, largely because you can do a lot with it, so where do you start, especially if you don't have a use case that touches all the pieces? It's a problem, and I have no easy solution on that front, but if you can just start playing with it you end up with a lot more power than Ansible. That said, if you just want to script up a config thing, well, Ansible will get you there faster. A lot faster. The moment you run into a problem with it, that may be the end of your journey, or you may have some hacking to do to add a feature, but until then it's easy to spin up (this is why we used it for an install script for our stuff, really. Took an hour to get through.) Cheers, -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
