Everybody seems to be taking about moving away from Puppet lately. Maybe I just don't do anything sufficiently complex with it, but I've never had any problems or gripes with Puppet. 99% of the time it seems like the thing I want to do has already been done in a well-written module on the forge. The author seems to cite two main reasons for wanting to move away from Puppet: their codebase was large and badly structur…
My puppet manifests is 16K. My modules is larger but I've got some large files stuck in there (long story)
There are meta questions like:
What are you doing with 15000 lines of puppet? I have a couple thousand and feel a bit over extended, like why am I doing this.
How are you replacing ten lines of puppet with 1 line of alternative when all I'm seeing in the examples is replacing 3 lines of
group { "logusers":
ensure => "present",
with
- name: Ensure groups exist
group: name={{ item.key }} gid={{ item.value.id }}
with_dict: users
There is also the question of why I'd configure individual groups on individual machines instead of just tossing it in the LDAP once, probably by hand. Or distributing a system wide /etc/groups much as I used to share a division wide emergency /etc/hosts (like, this is the minimum /etc/hosts required to conveniently fix DNS if DNS breaks).
(edited to add actual numbers. I have ldap and getent group | wc -l reports 76 groups. I could replace that with 76 groups * 3 lines per group plus a blank line between entries = 304 lines of hand maintained code. But in 3 lines I could distribute a golden /etc/group to all machines. Or in a few more lines I could make all my machines use LDAP and get passwd and some other stuff centrally controlled for free (and yes I use ldap for passwd and no I use kerberos for auth, so passwd just holds home dirs and stuff like that). So I could write hundreds of lines of puppet to get out of editing one golden group file or get out of running ldap, but the alternatives are so much easier...)
There exists a meta question of allocation of resources. You can do "everything sysadmin" in puppet. Or make a universal does it all gold image that is well backed up and enables or disables parts of itself based on role and never automate its configuration at all, just spin up images and give them "special" hostnames and they sort themselves out. Or not automate trivial parts. Or place some weirder config stuff in a shell script technically not part of puppet other than being distributed, run, and tested for error free operation. Or a mix across all. So I could see a "gentoo-like" start with an official distro image and use nothing but puppet to do everything taking 15000 lines of code, maybe. But that sounds hard... do it a different way, no need for different tools.