Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) writes: > > From: Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) > > > > The obstacle that has always held me back from automating is the lack of > > demand for identical systems, *and* the requirement to have essentially > > written a copy & pastable procedure as prerequisite before you could > > automate. > > If I could smoke a crazy pipe and make a wish for what I wanted to > do, it would be this - I would build a system, perhaps on AWS, > Vmware, whatever. Get it configured and working. And then tell some > tool to basically snapshot that machine's configuration, including > list of packages installed, and their configurations, and all the > other stuff that defines the machine state... In most of my > environments, I have some ability to actually snapshot the machine > storage, and then spin up clones of the machine. But I have to keep > a documented procedure of how the original config was created, so > it's not magic "special sauce." But snapshotting & cloning the > storage is undesirable because it is not portable. I'd like to build > a VM on my local vmware or virtualbox or whatever, and then > essentially clone it to AWS or vice versa... Make some change on a > development machine, test it, and then after it's validated, > replicate that change to the production environment by sending > essentia lly the snapshot differential of the configuration.
> For some reason, this is what I thought puppet/chef/etc did. Am I > wrong? Is this a pipe dream? Configuration management systems don't figure out what configurations you have, they just let you specify and deploy the configurations you want. You can get pretty much what you want if you build your systems from scratch using automated installation and configuration management tools, including doing things like staged development where you try changes in a test environment before deploying them in a production environment, where you essntially can apply diffs from your test environment to your production environment. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
