On Tue, 20 Mar 2012, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Tom Perrine wrote:
I've used both cfengine and Puppet over the years, and have met people
who have been successful with Chef. What has worked for others in
their specific environment may (or may not) work well for yours.
What I keep coming back to is that they seem like overkill for what I'm doing
right now - and carry with them the need to:
- install a layer of infrastructure
- work in yet another language (bash and sed do pretty much all I need, why
have to wade through recipes written in Ruby or Python or whatever)?
- do I really need to deal with lots of recipes to ultimately execute a few
install and config. statements (who really needs the overhead to execute
"apt-get install" or "./configure; ./make; ./make test, ./make install") - at
least for the stuff I'm managing now, the details are in site-specific
configurations, and it seems like a lot of getting that right with Chef (or
whatever) involves wading into and understanding how the individual recipes
work (or writing them)
Right now, I'm managing a small high-availability cluster (essentially a
mini-cloud) with one VM for email and list handling, another for managing
backups, and several for development. Where I expect that something like
chef, or puppet, or whatever will be helpful is in about 6 months when we
might be worrying about putting some code into production, and (fingers
crossed) scaling services across multiple VMs, some of which might be running
on AWS or elsewhere in the cloud. Right now, though, it's more about
documenting and streamlining management of the small cluster - partially to
simplify handoff to someone else to administer, partially to simplify
disaster recovery or hardware migration.
If you know you wnt to automate a bigger cluster later, take the time in
development with your small cluster to learn the tool and work through the
configuration.
David Lang
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