Am 08.01.2015 um 00:02 schrieb Alan McKinnon: > In my opinion, ansible almost always beats puppet. > > Puppet is a) complex b) built to be able to deal with vast enterprise > setups and c) has a definition language I never could wrap my brains > around. It always felt to me like puppet was never a good fit for my needs. > > Then ansible hit the scene. Now ansible is designed to do what sysadmins > do anyway, to do it in mostly the same way, and to do it in an automated > fashion. It fits nicely into my brain and I can read a playbook at a > glance to know what it does. > > Ansible deploys stuff and makes it like how you want it to be. It is > equally good at managing 1000 identical machines as 100 mostly the same > ones, or 20 totally different ones. How it manages this miracle is not > easy to explain, so I urge you to give it a test drive. Fool around with > a bunch of VMs to get a feel of how it works. A tip: keep it simple, and > use roles everywhere. > > Ansible works nicely with other tools like vagrant and docker which > build and deploy your base images. Once you have a base machine with > sshd running and an administrative login account, ansible takes over an > manages the rest. It works really well.
Thanks for the pointer, Alan. I will look into ansible asap ... installed it on my basement server already, but it's rather late in my $TIMEZONE ... > On the business side of things, yes indeed you need to rationalize > things and what you offer to customers. There comes a point where you > the business grows and you just can't manage all these different things. > Mistakes get made, SLAs slip, and everyone gets annoyed. exactly. $NEXTSTEP. > On how to track all that real-world data you mentioned, I have a few > rules of my own. Monitor and track everything I can, get and store as > much info out of logs as I can. All the info you need is in there > somewhere. But how to get it is a problem highly specific to your > business. Maybe start some new threads each one with a specific > question, and watch for common solutions in the answers? will do as soon as I am there, yes. S