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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

#91

Post by 23david »

terminalmage wrote: post #67
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.

Lol. And I do consulting. Hire me!!!!

And if you criticize me, I down-vote you. Classy.

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

#92

Post by danudey »

frankwiles wrote: post #36
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…

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?

ZeroMQ used to be full of assert() calls that would fail on bad data and crash whatever was listening. It was trivially easy to cause problems for someone's ZMQ socket-listening service. It's been fixed, but the perception lingers on.

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

#93

Post by Game_Ender »

gunmetal wrote: post #73

Salt is missing templates, the ability to use higher level programming language and all the environment/roles that I find the most powerful part of Chef.

You are wrong on all counts here. Salt supports Jinja2 template engine, so you can template your states [1]. You define custom states in python [2]. In the root configuration file (top.sls) you target configuration based on host name, grains (machine specific information) [3].

1 - http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/tutorials/states_pt3.html

2 - http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/states/writing.htm

3 - http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/states/top.html

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

#94

Post by sciurus »

susi22 wrote: post #50
yxhuvud wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Red Hat recently released Ruby 1.9.3 packages as part of "software collections"; I assume CentOS is rebuilding these and making them available the same as they do for other Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.

https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_D...

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

#95

Post by tr4656 »

danudey wrote: post #89
[deleted] wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

This is a pretty reductionist explanation, and it misses a lot of the benefits of state management. You make it sound like you just write a bunch of lines of shell script and you can sub in some variables, which is not at all their major strength. The benefit of Salt, which it has over Ansible, is that it doesn't have to use SSH (which, as mentioned in the article, doesn't scale well to large deploys), and it can do…

Ansible with Fireball wouldn't use SSH but rather 0mq.

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

#96

Post by mitchellh »

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…

The other responses are awesome, but I just want to nitpick one thing (as the creator of Vagrant): Vagrant isn't a configuration management tool, so it can't really be compared with Chef/Puppet.

Vagrant actually works with Chef, Puppet, CFEngine, Ansible, Salt, and more.

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

#97

Post by pestaa »

gunmetal wrote: post #73

Salt is missing templates, the ability to use higher level programming language and all the environment/roles that I find the most powerful part of Chef.

That statement is very very wrong. Salt has templates, renderers, grains, while supporting all the data structure languages you can dream of.

In fact, it is the most flexible software I've seen recently.

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

#98

Post by tr4656 »

jtreminio wrote: post #3

I was frustrated with Puppet when I first started. All I wanted was a VM to install a few things so I could do some development and not have to worry about managing my VM. It turned out to be a rabbit hole. As soon as I thought I learned just enough to get it running, something else popped up that stopped me. That's why I created PuPHPet [1]. So far the reception has been fairly positive. At one point in my learning,…

This is a pretty quick way of setting up basic vagrant boxes. Nice to see this exists.

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

#99

Post by awj »

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.

As a developer that primarily works on ruby, I can see it if he wanted 1.9.3. Most of the references you'll find on that tell you to use @environment_wrapper_of_the_month, and those are deep rabbit holes for people who know nothing about the language.

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

#100

Post by terminalmage »

dmohjoryder wrote: post #60

What I prefer about ansible above all others, besides its simplicity, is that its use case scales up and out. By that I mean ansible can be used for platform/app stack provisioning while OS/infra sys admins maybe another tool. To often an agent based approach causes a conflict with OS sys admins and platform/app team regarding ownership/sharing. I want to offer self service as much as possible. Further, most cfg mgmt…

http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/clientacl.html
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