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Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

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

#61

Post by crdoconnor »

SandB0x wrote: post #48

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 Vagra…

They basically let you write, using a declarative language, what state the server should be in. The software figures out how to set that up for you.

When you want to change the state, you edit the file - say, to add a package.

At any point you can set up an entirely new server from scratch using that same code.

You can't do that easily with bash scripts.

(you could if they worked like virtualenv requirements files but that only works for python's virtualenv...)

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

#62

Post by nailer »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #42
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 she…

Link: http://www.ansibleworks.com/ and https://github.com/ansible/ansible

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

#63

Post by kapilvt »

The thing that bugs me about salt is the almost complete lack of testing/coverage. They had tons of egg-face releases for crypto bugs, upgrade issues, things a basic test suite would have solved. I'd rather not trust my production environments to something that's a roll of the dice of whether its working, secure, or upgradable on a given release.

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

#64

Post by AlexanderDhoore »

SandB0x wrote: post #48

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 Vagra…

I just now (past few days) started learning about this stuff. I've been doing the "Learning Puppet" tutorials [1].

The most important thing about it is that you describe the state of the server. And puppet applies it for you. It's idempotent (you might know this term from REST). You can run puppet multiple times and the end result would be the same.

Normally (without config management) you would write scripts that do the configuration. If you ran them twice, things could go wrong, or they would overwrite the stuff from last time. Scripts are descriptions of what steps to take. Puppet manifests are descriptions of what state you want the server to be in.

[1] http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/index.html

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

#65

Post by statenjason »

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.

I started with cdist, but ansible won me over. I bootstrap ansible-pull using cloudinit. It's been an excellent experience so far.

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

#66

Post by lmickh »

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.

rbenv is a great way to get whatever version of ruby you want up and going fast. Install a couple dependencies, clone the git repo, and run the install.sh. I went from never using it to running on CentOS 6 in a half hour.

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

#67

Post by terminalmage »

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…

reads article about A

I've tried B, C, D, and E, and I like E.

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

#68

Post by WickyNilliams »

Is there a comparable tool for Windows?

Powershell works great for executing commands on arbitrary servers (which sounds like the basis of Salt), but it'd be great to declaratively say "I want the server in this state" like the config management side of salt. I assume there is a tool built atop of Powershell like this somewhere?

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

#69

Post by ipmb »

tptacek wrote: post #52
frankwiles wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Awesome. How many people have reviewed it for flaws? How many people have reviewed OpenSSH?

If it's a concern, just lock it up behind iptables. Only let your master talk to your minions and your minions can only talk to your master.

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

#70

Post by ipmb »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #68

Is there a comparable tool for Windows? Powershell works great for executing commands on arbitrary servers (which sounds like the basis of Salt), but it'd be great to declaratively say "I want the server in this state" like the config management side of salt. I assume there is a tool built atop of Powershell like this somewhere?

Salt can configure Windows machines, but you need to have the master running on *nix iirc.
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