I'm still looking for a configuration management system that doesn't assume that the first step towards managing servers is to add a new "master" server. From the thread, ansible looks promising. In the meantime I'll keep using chef-solo until opscode kills it.
Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
31–40 of 274 posts
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#32Personally, I don't think puppet sucks
The problem is most dev-ops and sysadmins don't know ruby and that's a HUGE disadvantage. In the end configuration management will often by done by sysadmins.
Puppet doesn't require you to do any Ruby.
Also, Salt is written in python, for which the same argument holds as well for almost all environments.
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is most dev-ops and sysadmins don't know ruby and that's a HUGE disadvantage. In the end configuration management will often by done by sysadmins.
I'm only managing 24 machines with puppet, so nothing fancy, but I managed to do all of the stuff I needed without writing a single line of Ruby code. That was handy for me too as while I'm somewhat familiar with Ruby, I'm no expert at all. I can read Ruby no problem and I can write ruby that's not-quite-idiomatic and I'm terribly slow at it.
I forgot to mention that just installing ruby is a HUGE PITA on anything but the most common OSes. It took me 3h last week to get it on a CentOS installed. And I don't even want to try to get it running on our Solaris hosts...
Point is: Python is the number one scripting language (after bash) for sysadmins just like Perl used to be.
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is most dev-ops and sysadmins don't know ruby and that's a HUGE disadvantage. In the end configuration management will often by done by sysadmins.
Puppet doesn't require you to do any Ruby. Also, Salt is written in python, for which the same argument holds as well for almost all environments.
It's hard to find an O/S w/o python these days. In the env. I work in we don't have ruby at all installed (Solaris, CentOS, BSD, Windows).
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#35Yet another un-googlable project name. Pretty much kills it for me.
Have you tried Googling salt stack? I've had zero problems finding tutorials and documentation.
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#36I've used Fabric, Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, and have settled on Ansible; it's a sort of middle ground between Fabric and Chef that does more than just run commands on servers but doesn't require me to buy into a whole elaborate universe of configuration management servers and whatnots. Ansible is great. The ZeroMQ stuff makes sense if you're pushing configurations inside a data center, but it's a dealbreaker for us…
I don't understand why ZeroMQ outside of a data center would be a deal breaker for anyone. You do realize the data on the wire is encrypted right?
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#37I think salt is neato, but I also find it very frustrating to use! (Possibly through no fault of salt itself - I feel like I must be missing something.) I am generally able to SSH into a box and get things configured the way I need. However, I have huge amounts of trouble translating that into salt scripts. Consider logrotate. Here is the only documentation I can find on the topic [1]. From this, I have no idea what…
Hey memset - these sound like pretty straightforward questions (with straightforward answers). Perhaps asking on the mailing list, or hop onto the #salt channel on freenode IRC?
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#38SaltStack also won at Gigaom Structure last week!
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/devops-player-saltstack-wins-st...
(I'm a SaltStack employee)
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#39I've used Fabric, Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, and have settled on Ansible; it's a sort of middle ground between Fabric and Chef that does more than just run commands on servers but doesn't require me to buy into a whole elaborate universe of configuration management servers and whatnots. Ansible is great. The ZeroMQ stuff makes sense if you're pushing configurations inside a data center, but it's a dealbreaker for us…
If you don't want to run a master, you can use Salt in masterless mode: https://salt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/tutorials/stan...
Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
#40> MCollective (which Puppet Labs acquired several years ago) was (and remains!) fiendishly complex to set up.
I didn't find MCollective hard at all - you just install some debs, a message queue server (Stomp was easiest at the time - it's now deprecated, but surely is not much different to RabbitMQ?) and it Just Worked for me. And there was a great screencast.
Did it get far more complicated since I used it last?