[CentOS] Suggestions for Config Management Tool

Fabian Arrotin
Thu, 12 May 2016 13:27:48 -0000

On 12/05/16 10:21, James Hogarth wrote:
> On 12 May 2016 at 08:22, G?tz Reinicke - IT Koordinator <
> goetz.reinicke at filmakademie.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> we see a growing need for a better Configuration management for our
>> servers.
>>
>> Are there any known good resources for a comparison of e.g. Puppet,
>> Chef, Ansible etc?
>>
>> What would you suggest and why? :)
>>
>>
>>
>
> Puppet is great for central control with automatic runs making systems
> right and keeping them in line, it's not an orchestration tool though -
> however it's commonly supplemented with something like rundeck and/or
> mcollective to assist here.
>
> Chef is great for a ruby house - you'll need to brush up on your ruby
as
> writing cookbooks is heavily tied to the language. Historically it was very
> debian focused with issues like selinux problems. I believe these have been
> generally resolved though.
>
> Ansible is a great orchestration tool and excellent for going from base to
> a configured system. It is less of a tool to keep things inline with a base
> however with no central automated runs (ignoring Tower which is not FOSS
> yet).
>
> Ansible is also much simpler to get into given the tasks are just like
> following through a script for defining how to make a system, as opposed to
> learning an actual DSL like required for understanding puppet modules.
>
> There's a growing pattern of using ansible for orchestration alongside
> puppet for definitions as well (there's a specific ansible module to
carry
> out a puppet run).
>
> I've not looked at salt at all personally.
>
> Came across this article a while back:
>
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609482/data-center/data-center-review-puppet-vs-chef-vs-ansible-vs-salt.html

+1 on your comments around those ones.
After that, it's up to the sysadmin (and also sharing with the group of
colleagues working in the infra team) to test and see which one fits the
bill.
Some people really dislike ansible, while personally I like it more than
puppet, but it's also a personal feeling with the tool : do you prefer
green or red (and then someone will answer "blue" !) ? both are
colors,
but we have a preference.
Same for cfgmgmt tools, assuming that they do what you want them to do too.

--
Fabian Arrotin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
gpg key: 56BEC54E | twitter: @arrfab

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