Hi Folks,
New list member here, seems like this might be the place to pose this
question:
I'm getting ready to rebuild a small cluster - mostly used for
development, but likely to move into a production role, and thinking
about being prepared if we need to scale. As a result, I'm looking at
way to move from a rather ad hoc management approach - configuration
notes and task checklists in word documents, spreadsheet of IP addresses
and DNS records, bunches of shell scripts and cron jobs - to something a
bit more organized and scaleable.
My first thought is to start with a simple database for config. info,
and moving scripts under configuration control; maybe adding an
orchestration tool like rundeck (though call me old fashioned enough to
think about writing some wrapper code in tcl).
Anyway, when I asked for tool suggestions on one of the devops lists,
where I kind of figured was the place to ask about tools, about all I
got were religious pontifications about puppet or chef being the "one
true way" - which seems a bit out of line with my experience of
real-world operations, both in the small, and in the large (been around
both, though more as an architect for large systems than as an operator).
Which leads me to pose two questions:
1. What is the state of the practice right now? How much is sys
administration a world of traditional approaches, vs. how much have the
new generation of devops tools caught on outside the core of folks
who've drunk the koolaid? (I'm really trying to get calibrated in
reality here.)
2. My more specific question re. what are people using to manage
accumulated scripts and semi-manual procedures?
I'm looking for something along the following lines - an orchestration
tool that would:
- provide for editing/managing/versioning scripts (script = anything
that can be invoked at the command line)
- a library of control functions for use within scripts
- invoking scripts, combinations of scripts, pipelines of scripts (in
the Unix sense of pipes) - locally, remotely, across multiple machines
- remote script execution via ssh, rather than some kind of agent
- providing a simple database for keeping track of variables used by
scripts (e.g., IP addresses, DNS records for use by a provisioning
script) - that can be accessed from scripts
- accessing the above via cli, RESTful API, GUI
- cross-platform
- (nice-to-have) minimal environmental requirements (i.e., a step above
the unix shell, say the gnu buildtool suite rather than the JVM + a mass
of libraries, or the ruby ecosystem -- a self-configuring basic
environment would be nice, like perl+cpan)
I'm sure we've each cobbled something together along these lines - be it
through manual processes, standard installs, or something fancier. I'm
kind of wondering what different people have done, what pieces fit
together better than others, what's available that's more integrated but
that doesn't create a monolithic environment.
Rundeck seems to do most (all?) of this, running on Java. It looks
nice, but it's also really new.
tcl/tk provides a lot of this - but without the organizing functions
(tcl/tk + git, or maybe a tcl/tk IDE perhaps?)
What have people found that works?
Thanks very much,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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