Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

linuxjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

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

#41

Post by crdoconnor »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #37
crdoconnor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping for this too. Especially somebody who has used both exhaustively. At first glance the architecture of both seems to be pretty sensible, clean, minimal and good in all the ways that puppet isn't. I half heartedly picked salt based upon the following: * More commits in github. * More pull requests in github. * Main website is ranked higher by alexa. However, after using salt for a short while, I ran into a c…

Ansible is moving at a pretty good clip too. We do strongly encourage squash commits so I wouldn't go by counts alone, but pick what tool you like to use most and that best fits your needs, and your style, and what you want to do with it.

Well, that's the problem...both look good to me. Similar style, technologies and philosophy behind both.

I'd really appreciate a deeper comparison, though - especially if you feel that there are certain areas/circumstances where ansible may shine over salt.

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

#42

Post by crdoconnor »

ceejayoz wrote: post #34
crdoconnor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more similar to ansible than puppet. Both are python based and use zeromq. All four are declarative and AFAIK, all four have a dedicated daemon on the client.

Ansible's ZeroMQ is an optional extra feature - out-of-the-box it works fine without a daemon on the client, as it just uses SSH.

It's the same for salt. Neither one has to use ZeroMQ, neither one has to use a daemon.

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

#43

Post by mpdehaan2 »

ch0wn wrote: post #40
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

I love Ansible. After having used puppet and chef at the company I work for, everyone was thrilled about how easy and boiler-plate free Ansible is. Chef is great for bigger architectures, but if your goal is to provision a limited set of servers and document it's configuration in a readable format, Ansible is truly fantastic.

Thanks! BTW, I'm not sure limited applies. There are several setups with thousands of nodes and users doing some pretty complex multi-tier orchestration magic (N-tier, load balancers, monitoring outage windows, Jenkins, all integrated, etc). And you've got ansible-pull for mega-large scale if you want.

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

#45

Post by mpdehaan2 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #41
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansible is moving at a pretty good clip too. We do strongly encourage squash commits so I wouldn't go by counts alone, but pick what tool you like to use most and that best fits your needs, and your style, and what you want to do with it.

Well, that's the problem...both look good to me. Similar style, technologies and philosophy behind both. I'd really appreciate a deeper comparison, though - especially if you feel that there are certain areas/circumstances where ansible may shine over salt.

Sure, you can see some of my comments here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5244740

Main thing on Ansible is the focus on multi-tier and process orchestration, without having to rely on coding up event paths between nodes -- admittedly it's a niche problem, but to me, deployment is as important as config management, and often harder. That being said you can write deployment in anything if you try hard enough, but I built what fit my brain and the particular needs of a few past companies deploying multi-tier web apps. While it is easy to have ad-hoc in the product (Puppet also does this with mCollective), it's a bit harder to be able to both model deployment and declarative state, and then make that into content you can hand over to a security auditor who doesn't know the language and he can say, yep, that's exactly what we want.

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

#47

Post by pekk »

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

What's misleading in these requirements is that the "Python 2.6+" spec implies support for Python 3, which the Ansible authors have actually said they won't support for ideological reasons. It would be more accurate to write "2.6/2.7".

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

#48

Post by mpdehaan2 »

pekk wrote: post #47
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

What's misleading in these requirements is that the "Python 2.6+" spec implies support for Python 3, which the Ansible authors have actually said they won't support for ideological reasons. It would be more accurate to write "2.6/2.7".

Not ideological reasons but more so pragmatism. But sure 2.X series.

And 2.4+ nodes can be managed.

Once Python 3 is the thing everywhere I'm sure we'll have compliance. Ditto with, say, OpenStack which is also holding off. You kind of treat them as two different languages to a degree, if you still want to support things like RHEL 5 (2.4), you have to.

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

#49

Post by bascule »

Salt is using its own homebrew transport encryption protocol instead of TLS (which, among other things, serializes everything as JSON o_O): https://salt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/specs/salt_aut...

Why are they doing this? Good question!

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

#50

Post by mpdehaan2 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #42
ceejayoz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansible's ZeroMQ is an optional extra feature - out-of-the-box it works fine without a daemon on the client, as it just uses SSH.

It's the same for salt. Neither one has to use ZeroMQ, neither one has to use a daemon.

What remote transports does it have that are daemonless?
Post reply on HN