On 03/31/2015 09:21 PM, Leon Towns-von Stauber wrote:
One of the main reasons we're looking at Salt as an alternative to
CFE 3 is the support for Windows, which is pretty expensive for CFE.
Our Windows team would like something better than SMS, and it'd be
nice if we could share the same tool for Windows and Linux.
Thanks to everyone for the responses. I've found that there are very
few people with exposure to more than one configuration management
system (actually, there are shockingly few people that have
experience with *any* CMS); it helps to have the members of LOPSA to
draw on for questions like this.
- Leon
I work for a school district that is severely labor constrained and uses
a lot of part time tech assistants to get the work done. Our
environment is a mix of linux and windows almost all which are one off
machines (I have 2 services that have 4 nodes each). I have tried both
Cfengine and Puppet and am now using Salt. Cfengine worked fine, but
the language is way too difficult for a part timer to pick up and do
useful work. Puppet initially started out ok, but then it too became
very complex with a high learning curve.
So we set up Chef, Ansible, and Salt for a look see. Chef was a lot
like Puppet (capable and complex). Ansible was interesting, but very
slow at times and we could never get the windows stuff working. Salt
just worked out of the box against windows and linux. The structure on
disk and of the yaml files is simple enough (or can be made simple
enough) that we can set it up and look at it an hour a month and still
understand what is going on.
So from my perspective if you need something that you can easily train
other people on, something that you only get a little bit of time to
work with, give Salt a try. I am not sure if it can handle really
complex systems and it definitely doesn't hide a lot behind providers
(e.g. you need if statements to pick the correct user, group, and daemon
for apache for each OS). In our case this is not a problem, but if you
were running apache on several different OS;s, Salt may not be the best
choice.
cheers,
ski
--
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
connected to the entire universe" John Muir
Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, kacoro...@gmail.com, 206-501-9803
or ski98033 on most IM services
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