2009/12/30 berber <webersi...@gmail.com>:
I'm starting to wonder, put bluntly so don’t get mad, if “Lazy” system admins run puppet continuously in production, while putting their systems in harm way due to a possible bug in puppet, corruption of the source, accidental changes to the manifest, etc… just so they don’t have to follow tiring procedures or keep track of manual changes to the servers (damn that was long).
That's a highly subjective view. The decision to run Puppet this way is a risk equation (it's actually two risks - you've conflated them above)? The risks goes something like this:
* There is the risk of a bug in Puppet that could impact my production availability * There is a risk that poor controls will result in incorrect configuration being applied and impact my production availability These risks exists with pretty much every sysadmin tool that has similar powers - even just having root on the box - hence the sudo warning: We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things: #1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type. #3) With great power comes great responsibility. We then determine if the likelihood/consequence of the risk of running Puppet in a particular mode outweigh the benefits? If in your environment it does then you shouldn't do it. And that's the first risk... Alternatively, if you have weighed up this risk and said "Sure I'll run it continuously" then you have to consider the mitigating controls that reduce the likelihood/consequences of any faults. Such controls include staging changes, version control manifests, work flow, test changes, --noop mode, change control, segregation of duties, etc, etc, etc. If you can reduce the level of risk to whatever your appetite is then you've addressed the second risk. That's professional, rational, and working within your organisation's risk appetite. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Regards James Turnbull -- Author of: * Pro Linux System Administration (http://tinyurl.com/linuxadmin) * Pulling Strings with Puppet (http://tinyurl.com/pupbook) * Pro Nagios 2.0 (http://tinyurl.com/pronagios) * Hardening Linux (http://tinyurl.com/hardeninglinux)
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
