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Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

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Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

dantheta wrote: post #8

I'm currently a reasonably happy puppet user, but I do like the look of Salt. Puppet's configuration DSL always struck me as a little over-wrought (and slightly too inconsistent to remember easily). I would have preferred YAML/XML/ini files.

I complained about cfengine's syntax in a blog post a while ago[1]; someone mentioned that a patch for YAML-based cfengine manifests had been proposed. I haven't seen anything since, but then ... well I don't follow the cfengine news too closely.

It largely seems to be that a lot of these systems take their directives as nestable key-value pairs, so I think YAML is a good fit.

Amusingly, the first link someone posted on my blog post was to Salt. I didn't dig too deep at the time as it appeared to be more at the REF end of the spectrum to me.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#13

Post by ciupicri »

There is also Ansible [1] which is written in Python and connects to servers using SSH (combined with sudo if needed). This means you don't need to install anything on the servers you're managing, since most distributions have Python >= 2.4 included. For more details see the requirements page [2].

[1] http://ansible.cc/

[2] http://ansible.cc/docs/gettingstarted.html#requirements

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#14

Post by ciupicri »

dantheta wrote: post #8

I'm currently a reasonably happy puppet user, but I do like the look of Salt. Puppet's configuration DSL always struck me as a little over-wrought (and slightly too inconsistent to remember easily). I would have preferred YAML/XML/ini files.

If you want YAML, check out ansible ( http://ansible.cc/ )

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#15

Post by indymike »

I've been using Salt for about 10 months. It's pretty simple and is exceptionally fast when compared to many alternatives. Also, the code is absolutely clean, easy to read and well commented. We actually use Salt's code when we need an example of how to do python right... especially when you want to make diffs easy.

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#16

Post by stevekemp »

ciupicri wrote: post #13

There is also Ansible [1] which is written in Python and connects to servers using SSH (combined with sudo if needed). This means you don't need to install anything on the servers you're managing, since most distributions have Python >= 2.4 included. For more details see the requirements page [2]. [1] http://ansible.cc/ [2] http://ansible.cc/docs/gettingstarted.html#requirements

And my own tool, this time in Perl, which is thoroughly documented here:

http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/guide/

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#17

Post by fsniper »

Salt is a promising tool for configuration management and remote execution.

But I believe it's still in it's early stages and need to go way much much more. My colleague decided upon using salt instead of chef or puppet. I'm ok with this decision but had too made some tweaks and send bug fixes or features upstream while testing environment.

I believe there may be many more to come.

Still, it's easy to use, configure and also it's still really nice on the eyes with being python. It's trivial to make fixes to the code base.

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#18

Post by X-Istence »

ciupicri wrote: post #13

There is also Ansible [1] which is written in Python and connects to servers using SSH (combined with sudo if needed). This means you don't need to install anything on the servers you're managing, since most distributions have Python >= 2.4 included. For more details see the requirements page [2]. [1] http://ansible.cc/ [2] http://ansible.cc/docs/gettingstarted.html#requirements

There is also Fabric [1] to allow management of remote servers using Python scripts.

[1] http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.5/

Re: Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ

#19

Post by buster »

ciupicri wrote: post #13

There is also Ansible [1] which is written in Python and connects to servers using SSH (combined with sudo if needed). This means you don't need to install anything on the servers you're managing, since most distributions have Python >= 2.4 included. For more details see the requirements page [2]. [1] http://ansible.cc/ [2] http://ansible.cc/docs/gettingstarted.html#requirements

And it can also use zeromq ;)
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