[TriLUG] Curious

[magnus at yonderway.com]

On 26.10.2014 15:53, Z-man wrote:
> So I saw the question about Puppet and just have to ask, how widely 
> used is
> Puppet?  I am investigating it along with other librarian products to 
> tie
> into Subversion for deployment and was wondering about its adoption.  
> Also,
> if you use it, could you tell me what other products did you 
> investigate
> before deciding upon Puppet?

Puppet is VERY widely used.

Subversion, not so much anymore.

While you can deploy with Puppet, that's not really what it's good at. 
I like to think of Puppet as more of a convergent configuration 
management system that works under an eventual consistency model.

For deployments, you really want an orchestration tool, IMO. In the 
Puppet universe, that's most likely mcollective. Though I've used 
capistrano and (more recently) ansible for orchestration and have been 
well pleased.

You may be able to do it all with Ansible. Though I tend to reach for 
Ansible more for bootstrapping new systems and orchestrating complex 
deployments. I still live in a Puppet world when it comes to day to day 
configuration management, though do yourself a favor and read up on the 
Role::Profile model before you invest time into setting up your Puppet 
infrastructure.

Puppet and Chef share a fairly similar mindspace. Puppet probably 
appeals more generally to people with SysAdmin background, I think. Your 
manifests mostly look like big configuration files. Chef tends to appeal 
more to Ruby developers. I like to think of it as a Ruby framework for 
infrastructure. Both of them are inspired, I think, by CFEngine (which 
you may want to look at, though it doesn't have the mindshare of its 
children).

Ansible is a locally made product, quite capable, with a very different 
working model from Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine. It's perfectly OK to use 
Ansible as an orchestration tool and Puppet as your configuration 
management tool. Or use Ansible for both roles. I don't think Puppet 
makes for good orchestration, though.

-M