That was a pretty poor review. Giving a summary of the table of contents isn't a review. Additionally it doesn't seem like they recognize that devops and duplicative administration don't fit with a lot of data processing models. There are many organizations that have servers that have a distinct purpose and it doesn't make sense to envision them as just another clone system in "the cloud".
That was a pretty poor review. Giving a summary of the table of contents isn't a review. Additionally it doesn't seem like they recognize that devops and duplicative administration don't fit with a lot of data processing models. There are many organizations that have servers that have a distinct purpose and it doesn't make sense to envision them as just another clone system in "the cloud".
This is why puppet has a very strong inheritance system...
We have it broken down as generic server (2 factor/LDAP configs, nagios configs, etc) and then apache_servers which build out the basic web infrastructure and then more specialized configs for one-off speicalized servers... (admin server versus production web servers)
There is pretty much nothing you can do by hand that puppet can't also do - and often it takes just as much time to update a single puppet config file and run the puppet update pr
There is pretty much nothing you can do by hand that puppet can't also do - and often it takes just as much time to update a single puppet config file and run the puppet update process as it would be to ssh into the server and make the manual change.
Another advantage is what might go into traditional documentation is now just a puppet configuration.. Oh, fuck, this server crashed? Just roll another in 5 minutes... Who cares about the old one..
And this is the flaw in your argument. There seems to be some ass
There is pretty much nothing you can do by hand that puppet can't also do - and often it takes just as much time to update a single puppet config file and run the puppet update process as it would be to ssh into the server and make the manual change.
Another advantage is what might go into traditional documentation is now just a puppet configuration.. Oh, fuck, this server crashed? Just roll another in 5 minutes... Who cares about the old one..
And this is the flaw in your argument. There seems to be some assumption that if it's not under control of Puppet or Chef then it's manual. This is completely untrue. Any competent admin automates their administration. I've been doing it for more than a decade.
Second it's not the host OS and host configuration that makes the servers distinct. It's the data. You can't automate ten years worth of data entry and workflow modules. I suppose it would be unfair of me to hold against you the fact that you don't know anything about my operations, but we're not an internet based company. We're doing stuff other than serving up a bunch of vanity gopro videos. We have several large data centers but we also have hundreds of offices around the world and those offices have their own IT infrastructure. Anyone can stand up a server in 10 minutes in their data center. How long will it take you to stand one up Chengdu given that your primary data centers are in the US and Europe and your network line to the remote facility is 512Kb/s?
The absurdity of the proponents of CFengine, Puppet, Chef, et. al. is that they assume no one has ever solved these problems before. What problems that I have are these products going to solve for me? The emphasis is on "problems that I have". It's not sufficient to tell me what a product does, it's whether it solves my problems.
You are right, there is nothing you can do with puppet that you can't do with SSH, and 10 years ago things like puppet didn't even exist so it makes total sense for you to be in the situation you're in and it wouldn't make alot of sense for you to switch just for the sake of using puppet.
But it's 2013, if you're starting off new - why would you roll your own when many solutions already exist that have been thoroughly tested and extended to have a rich feature set that you probally wouldn't have time to de
I spent a week in the headquarters of one of the vendors mentioned in these comments training on their product. What I discovered is they just can't recognize that a lot of companies are not technology companies. And those companies' IT organizations aren't in the business of standing up or rebuilding hundreds or thousands of servers per week. And those companies have mature IT organizations. And their servers are often not nicely concentrated in a handful of data centers. After about half the week had gone
"An optimisation in configuration management shouldn't be causing such a large impact"
I remember that when Windows 95 came to the party I was using whatever window manager used HP-Ux back then, VUE, or something like that -and it was far from a fair comparation (and that's out of my generosity of not trying to remember when it was not Windows 95 but Windows 3.x the one to compare against). But Windows 95 brought that kind of interfaces to the masses and *that* made a big difference.
Poor review (Score:5, Insightful)
That was a pretty poor review. Giving a summary of the table of contents isn't a review. Additionally it doesn't seem like they recognize that devops and duplicative administration don't fit with a lot of data processing models. There are many organizations that have servers that have a distinct purpose and it doesn't make sense to envision them as just another clone system in "the cloud".
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Giving a summary of the table of contents isn't a review.
Yeah even by elementary school book review standards this would be pretty poor. This person apparently thought that "book review" means "synopsis".
Re:Poor review (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That was a pretty poor review. Giving a summary of the table of contents isn't a review. Additionally it doesn't seem like they recognize that devops and duplicative administration don't fit with a lot of data processing models. There are many organizations that have servers that have a distinct purpose and it doesn't make sense to envision them as just another clone system in "the cloud".
This is why puppet has a very strong inheritance system... We have it broken down as generic server (2 factor/LDAP configs, nagios configs, etc) and then apache_servers which build out the basic web infrastructure and then more specialized configs for one-off speicalized servers... (admin server versus production web servers)
There is pretty much nothing you can do by hand that puppet can't also do - and often it takes just as much time to update a single puppet config file and run the puppet update pr
Re: (Score:2)
And this is the flaw in your argument. There seems to be some ass
Re: (Score:3)
And this is the flaw in your argument. There seems to be some assumption that if it's not under control of Puppet or Chef then it's manual. This is completely untrue. Any competent admin automates their administration. I've been doing it for more than a decade.
Second it's not the host OS and host configuration that makes the servers distinct. It's the data. You can't automate ten years worth of data entry and workflow modules. I suppose it would be unfair of me to hold against you the fact that you don't know anything about my operations, but we're not an internet based company. We're doing stuff other than serving up a bunch of vanity gopro videos. We have several large data centers but we also have hundreds of offices around the world and those offices have their own IT infrastructure. Anyone can stand up a server in 10 minutes in their data center. How long will it take you to stand one up Chengdu given that your primary data centers are in the US and Europe and your network line to the remote facility is 512Kb/s?
The absurdity of the proponents of CFengine, Puppet, Chef, et. al. is that they assume no one has ever solved these problems before. What problems that I have are these products going to solve for me? The emphasis is on "problems that I have". It's not sufficient to tell me what a product does, it's whether it solves my problems.
You are right, there is nothing you can do with puppet that you can't do with SSH, and 10 years ago things like puppet didn't even exist so it makes total sense for you to be in the situation you're in and it wouldn't make alot of sense for you to switch just for the sake of using puppet.
But it's 2013, if you're starting off new - why would you roll your own when many solutions already exist that have been thoroughly tested and extended to have a rich feature set that you probally wouldn't have time to de
Re: (Score:2)
"10 years ago things like puppet didn't even exist"
cfengine, anyone? (you know, it's about 20 years old, not just 10)
Re: (Score:2)
I spent a week in the headquarters of one of the vendors mentioned in these comments training on their product. What I discovered is they just can't recognize that a lot of companies are not technology companies. And those companies' IT organizations aren't in the business of standing up or rebuilding hundreds or thousands of servers per week. And those companies have mature IT organizations. And their servers are often not nicely concentrated in a handful of data centers. After about half the week had gone
Re: (Score:2)
"An optimisation in configuration management shouldn't be causing such a large impact"
I remember that when Windows 95 came to the party I was using whatever window manager used HP-Ux back then, VUE, or something like that -and it was far from a fair comparation (and that's out of my generosity of not trying to remember when it was not Windows 95 but Windows 3.x the one to compare against). But Windows 95 brought that kind of interfaces to the masses and *that* made a big difference.
Puppet, Chef and the lik
Re: (Score:2)
"What I've come to suspect, is that the advocates of these tools have never learned how to do disciplined system administration."
It's quite like Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is rubish, so you can bet 90% of those advocates are...
But don't fool yourself: infrastructure.org has been up, how much? 10/15 years? and the concepts are already there, so it's nothing fancy new.
"unless a system has been subjected to Puppet, then it's some mysterious black box full of scorpions and sharp glass."
I've been roughly
Re: (Score:1)