On 14 Aug 2014, at 10:06, Bruce Simpson <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 14/08/2014 12:19, James Bensley wrote: >> Is anyone here using Netconf and Yang? >> >> I wondered about a good netconf system and tail-f is the only >> commercial one I know of. Anyone using it or something else? > > Frankly, I'm surprised that FreeBSD doesn't ship with a Netconf server yet... The cool kids are doing system automation and orchestration using puppet, chef, ansible, salt, etc (choose your poison), with bare-metal installs managed using tools like cobbler. Many of these are seeing more active development on linux than FreeBSD, linux being a more popular vehicle for devops these days, it seems. These kinds of approaches work much better at scale, and are far more flexible than the approach implied by netconf (which is based on the assumption that you always know what is running in a particular place, and you always know how to configure it). There's a certain amount of cultural dissonance involved as a sysadmin in the shift between "write a script to do X" and "write a cookbook/recipe to do X" but the first time you realise that reinstalling 38 servers in twelve locations and shifting seven services around amongst them can realistically be achieved with little opportunity for human error in twenty minutes, the religion becomes quite compelling. (The ability for developers to manage their own development and test releases on a dev branch in svn or git and have ops/noc merge those into trunk in order to push changes to production is also quite tasty, as is the ability to reverse those changes easily when you realise the developers are all smoking crack.) Joe
