Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck • Hacker News Board

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#41

Post by jdboyd » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

susi22 wrote: post #12

IMO, ansible is even better: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/ It doesn't require any deamon and does all its work over the good old unix fashion way: SSH. And it's python too.

While I would prefer ansible as well, the author does show why ansible is problematic for some people:

> Chef works atop ssh, which – while the gold standard for cryptographically secure systems management – is computationally expensive to the point where most master servers fall over under the weight of 700-1500 clients

That said, unless you must have 700+ simultaneous slave connections, you should probably make life easier on yourself and choose ansible.

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#42

Post by mechanical_fish » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #18

I'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…

It's ridiculous how much more pleasant it is to use Ansible than Puppet or Chef. Its invention solves a big pain for me: As a veteran user of Puppet I'm a firm believer in using a tool like Puppet, but Puppet-and-Chef are overdesigned for small jobs (and, arguably, for most other jobs as well) so actually recommending them to a beginner has always felt like this:

A: "I just set up a cloud instance by running some shell commands by hand."

B: "You shouldn't do that, because of X and Y and Z. You should learn Puppet or Chef."

A: "Wait... did you just tell me to go spend thirty hours banging my head against solid objects, in exchange for nebulous benefits that I can't even perceive yet?"

B: "Why, yes, I believe I did!"

Ansible feels much less embarrassing to advocate.

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#43

Post by memset » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:10 PM UTC

Jedd wrote: post #37

memset wrote: post #17

I 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?

That is a great suggestion. I almost never do this for fear of sounding like a noob, but I ought to try giving it a shot more often.

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#44

Post by yxhuvud » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:12 PM UTC

susi22 wrote: post #33

pilif wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yum install ruby

took you 3h? It may take slightly longer if you want 1.9, but it still exists in fedora so it should not take 3h to solve.

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#45

Post by 1gor » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:17 PM UTC

https://github.com/seattlerb/rake-remote_task is all you need if you use ruby.

  require 'rake/remote_task'

  set :domain, 'abc.example.com'

  remote_task :foo do
    run "ls"
  end

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#46

Post by otterley » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:19 PM UTC

When used with Chef Server 11 (or Hosted Chef), Chef scales reasonably well. You install a client on each node, and the client speaks to the server via HTTPS + REST.

The unqualified assertion that Chef uses ssh is inaccurate. You can run chef-solo via ssh if you like, but you'll run into the same scalability ceiling as with any other ssh-based solution.

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#47

Post by Goladus » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:21 PM UTC

susi22 wrote: post #26

cultureulterior wrote: post #19

Personally, 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.

One doesn't need much ruby to get going with puppet. You need to learn the declarative puppet DSL, which is arguably an even bigger barrier. Automatic list expansion, for example, is a nice feature. But you can't have independent or nested variables, as with an imperative loop. So you wind up having to break each list into its own definition and then combine them all. The sysadmins I worked with were definitely not keen on having to think that way on a regular basis just to get some things done.

That said, I also disagree that puppet "sucks." It's good at what it claims to be good at so long as you can deal with its quirks.

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#48

Post by SandB0x » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:22 PM UTC

I'm not a web developer but I have a side-project that runs on a cobbled together EC2 instance. The server state is in theory documented in a set of of shell scripts and virtualenv requirements files.

I know that I should be doing this in a more robust way but whenever I try and read up on configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef, they're all described in comparative terms - Puppet does X better than Vagrant which does Y better than Chef, etc. I quickly lose patience and get back to digging myself into a deeper technical hole.

Is there a non-recursive explanation of what these tools are able to do and where someone like me should start?

Edit: Thanks for the helpful responses!

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#49

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:24 PM UTC

lobo_tuerto wrote: post #15

susi22 wrote: post #12

IMO, ansible is even better: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/ It doesn't require any deamon and does all its work over the good old unix fashion way: SSH. And it's python too.

From the article: "Chef works atop ssh, which – while the gold standard for cryptographically secure systems management – is computationally expensive to the point where most master servers fall over under the weight of 700-1500 clients. Salt’s approach was far simpler." Does that assertion about Chef somehow don't apply to Ansible? On the use case: "I have this command I want to run across 1,000 servers. I want the…

[deleted]

Re: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

#50

Post by susi22 » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:24 PM UTC

yxhuvud wrote: post #44

susi22 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yum install ruby took you 3h? It may take slightly longer if you want 1.9, but it still exists in fedora so it should not take 3h to solve.

Yes I needed 1.9.3 for this silly software. And I had a little special setup so rvm failed to compile. I'm also very overwhelmed by rvm,gem,bundler etc... Python has pip,easy_install(old) and virualenv. Which are just easier to understand for me. Ruby is too much magic and is trying to do everything automatically (IMO).