[TriLUG] Curious

[Matt Pusateri]

it’s been while, so maybe I just remember it as XML.  On a better note, apparently Foreman will work with Salt with a plugin.

On Oct 27, 2014, at 12:19 PM, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:

> Unless there's something about CFE3 that you've seen and I haven't... I haven't seen any XML.  I've seen a lot of CFE2-like configuration, but no XML.
> 
> William Sutton
> 
> On Mon, 27 Oct 2014, Matt Pusateri wrote:
> 
>> CFE2 didn't scale when I used it, and I just couldn't go the CFE3 XML route...
>> 
>> Matt P
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>>> On Oct 27, 2014, at 9:12 AM, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Interesting to read this.  I went to a Puppet camp some months ago after spending 6 months migrating our CFEngine 2 configuration to CFEngine 3. So far that's my only configuration management experience.
>>> 
>>> The good:
>>> Puppet does guarantee that it reaches a final known (and knowable) state. CFE doesn't.  It just keeps rerunning the ruleset until it thinks it got the right answer.
>>> 
>>> CF Engine is client-based, so each machine processes its ruleset, leaving the server (policy hub in CFE-speak) relatively bored.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The bad:
>>> CFE and Puppet have similar, but not identical rule language.  Sort of like how Perl and C have similar syntax, but not identical.
>>> 
>>> Puppet is policy-server-based.  For any number of client machines, you may have to have a cluster of Puppet policy servers to handle what they openly referred to as the "thundering herd" (self-DDoS, if you ask me) problem.
>>> 
>>> Puppet may have a final dependency list, but as Igor pointed out, you have to spell it out in your ruleset.
>>> 
>>> OTOH, with CFEngine, you may never know if you got there.  CFE keeps iterating until it thinks it found the answer--sort of like your co-worker who keeps telling the boss something until he thinks he said the right thing.
>>> 
>>> Moreover, CFE evaluates and caches variables.  Sometimes, it doesn't evaluate the variable at all.  That's a problem when the variable is used in filesystem path expansion.  It's a crisis when it nukes the contents of your resolv.conf file.
>>> 
>>> Also on the minus side for CFE--they routinely have bugs that haven't been fixed.  I actually ranted for 5-10 minutes on their Freenode IRC channel about how crummy it was, and its biggest supporters, while conceding that it was pretty crummy, argued that it wasn't as bad as it could be.
>>> 
>>> --
>>> 
>>> I'm going to have to look at saltstack given Matt's high praise.  There are some cool looking things about Puppet, but also some things that make me twitch a bit.  As far as CFEngine goes, I've seen both v2 and v3 (which, incidentally, are syntactically different; sufficiently so to hurt your brain), and while I can (usually) make it do what I need, it has its own deficiencies.
>>> 
>>> William Sutton
>>> 
>>>> On Sun, 26 Oct 2014, Igor Partola wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Puppet being morse code centric sounds about right. It is its own language, has its own client/server setup yet can be run without it, has a specific file layout you have to follow... It is confusing and weird. I use it because it gets the job done and because I have not yet figured out how to use Ansible :)
>>>> 
>>>> There are some great things about puppet:
>>>> 
>>>> - Has basic built in types that are idempotent. This is huge. I don't want to reinvent this, and here Puppet delivers.
>>>> 
>>>> - It supports the right built-in types: package, file, service, user, crontab.
>>>> 
>>>> - Extensive library of good modules to control things like Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.
>>>> 
>>>> - It works when done right.
>>>> 
>>>> The bad:
>>>> 
>>>> - The language is confusing. Includes, imports, etc. suck. Creating dependence is confusing and can be repetitive.
>>>> 
>>>> - It is much too slow for what it does. Basic package installation is done one at a time. Some really simple manifests that would take 5 seconds to run by hand, take minutes.
>>>> 
>>>> - Too many obscure features. The docs literally have things like "we just released this feature, but don't use it. It's a bad idea."
>>>> 
>>>> - Errors cascade, but there is now way to tell puppet to stop on errors. This way if installing MySQL fails, it will attempt to do other unrelated tasks instead of saying "ok fix the MySQL thing first ".
>>>> 
>>>> In conclusion, I am not converting any existing projects from Puppet to anything else, but I am looking at alternatives.
>>>> 
>>>> Igor
>>>> --
>>>> This message was sent to: William <william at trilug.org>
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>>> --
>>> This message was sent to: M. Pusateri <mpusateri at wickedtrails.com>
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>>> TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
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>>> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome
>> -- 
>> This message was sent to: William <william at trilug.org>
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>> TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
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>> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome
>> 
> -- 
> This message was sent to: M. Pusateri <mpusateri at wickedtrails.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that address.
> TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web	: http://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/mpusateri%40wickedtrails.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome