Hi All,
I've been exploring puppet and mcollective recently and I was
wondering if people here might be able to point me towards some
information on a potential use case. It seems like puppet is primarily
used at the moment as a tool for managing individual machine
configurations ('What do I need for a web server in production?'). At
the same time there is work going into imperative, distributed
solutions for provisioning machines and getting them set up with
puppet, either based on mcollective or custom built with tools like
fog (e.g. the new cloud provisioner). I'm wondering, though, has
anyone gone a step further and used the puppet declarative approach to
define the structure of a whole network? This would be particularly
useful for local CI environments when combined with virtualisation.
I'm assuming that a start point would either be exported resources or
(better, in my opinion) something vaguely like this -
http://www.devco.net/archives/2010/09/18/puppet_search_engine_with_mcollective.php
- using fact-based discovery to find appropriate services to link up
machines together. But the next logical step would be to go beyond
simply querying the state of existing resources ("what is the ip of
the database?") and say something more like "Ensure there is a
postgres 9.1 database running on my local subnet". I accept that this
could be a bit terrifying for a production environment, but in a local/
testing environment I could see it being hugely helpful. Clearly it
relies on puppet itself being able to control a variety of
virtualisation options, and perhaps a richer array of network service
controls as well.
Is this a crazy idea? Has anyone tried it? Or would sticking to e.g.
TheForeman be a better plan (I have only looked briefly at it, not
really tried it yet - at first glance it still seems a bit more
imperative than what I'm suggesting + I get the impression that it
relies on DNS to glue a lot of things together, which isn't
necessarily so appropriate in a heavily virtualised environment.
Lucian
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