First of all I will only talk about open sources solutions. I don’t want to take part of any commercial one. In addition, I will focus on only 4 solutions which seem to me the most used at this time. I will also talk about my history, my level on each one and why I recommend or not that solution.
Puppet is in my opinion the most known solution. Because of the marketing they were/are doing, because it was a good alternative compared to the old cfengine.
It’s been a while now that I’ve heard of Ansible but I only started playing with a week ago. You may certainly know that I’m a Puppet lover, but this solution is more powerful than Puppet in my opinion.
So I started to migrate my personal Puppet to Ansible just to play with. Here are the pros:
No client needed on the clients, only SSH! It’s written in Python By default a lot of modules Not only a configuration management tool, it’s an orchestrator too!
If you already played with Puppet’s environments, you certainly know that the major problem is the static form of them. When you want to test something new (a module for example), it’s not quite easy without using environments. r10k bring the dynamic feature and easy module managment !
It’s really easy to maintain your modules without using a lot of git submodules. Simply declare your modules informations like that:
mod 'filemapper', :git => 'git://github.
If you follow me, you should be aware that I use Vagrant every day. I wanted to get a Wheezy version with fr keyboard, up to date, correct locales and configured source.list file. I’ve also added Puppet and Chef on it.
So I’ve learned on how to build a box and it’s really easy by following the documentations on the website. Here is my Debian Wheezy box based on VirtualBox provider available on DropBox or Mega.
Puppetlabs recently made a book con Continuous Delivery and offer that book. Continuous delivery allows you to get new features and capabilities to market quickly and reliably. But what is this methodology, really, and what’s required to get started? This new, introductory ebook will share:
What continuous delivery is and isn’t Why continuous delivery is important to your business How to get started with the cultural technological changes required to practice continuous delivery You can download it there
I recently wrote a blog post regarding methods to write Puppet modules/manifests faster. I’ve made presentations for it, here are the slides :
I didn’t really play with Puppet since a long time and a lot of things have changed.
I’m currently writing a Puppet module for MySecureShell. And the thing is, it’s hard to quickly find the relevant information on how to build a module from scratch. I like to have experience return and what a chance when I saw a tweet regarding it, the same day as I started to write the module :-)
