Interesting that you should mention Windows. I haven't been in that world for many years now, but Active Directory + MSI packages + group policy with Windows 2K is vastly better than anything I've seen the open-source world come up with as far as deployment and configuration management.
In the Windows world, you can just set up a base image on a new server, drag and drop it into the right group in AD and let packages and group policy care of the rest. If that's not enough, via WMI and COM, you can do just about any sysadmin-related thing imaginable directly in python: http://timgolden.me.uk/python/wmi/cookbook.html If you're not a Microsoft fan, it can be hard to understand why anybody uses their stuff. The answer is that they (generally) make it ridiculously easy for the people who set up and administer their enterprise products. We use chef and capistrano at MPOW for deployment/config management and Fabric for miscellaneous scripting such as aggregating and processing server logs. Fabric's a great little library, but I can't imagine using it for any sort of complex deployment -- seems brittle and tedious to me, and it wouldn't give you any sort of version control or security for configuration files. I would take the Microsoft Way in a heartbeat if it didn't involve, you know, running Windows... --Casey On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 9:10 AM, Nimret Sandhu <[email protected]> wrote: > > +1 vagrant btw .. esp for those of us stuck on windoze =) > > cheers, > -- > Nimret Sandhu > http://www.nimret.org >
