Re: [Puppet Users] Re: Magazine article comparing CPU usage of Puppet vs. Cfengine

Jeff McCune
2010-02-24T03:19:19Z

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Disconnect <dc.disconnect@gmail.com>
wrote:
> ..or perhaps they used the native hosts type that exists to manage
> /etc/hosts entries?

Dooh, thank you.  I wish I could remove the previous email to prevent
my own misunderstanding from spreading.  I should go read the paper.

> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Jeff McCune <mccune.jeff@gmail.com>
wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:58 PM, tobyriddell
<toby.riddell@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > The result was either to add entries to /etc/hosts or to confirm
the
>> > contents of /etc/hosts.
>>
>> I haven''t read the article, but from this piece of information
I''m
>> _highly_ skeptical of the results having much to do with puppet
>> itself.
>>
>> I very much doubt that anyone with any credibility will state puppet
>> uses less CPU time than cfengine for similar tasks, but the authors
>> appear to have specifically selected an editfiles task which cfengine
>> does quite well and puppet does not have the native ability to manage.
>>  (Unless it''s been added in recent releases...)
>>
>> For reference:
>> "The hardest code to transition will be editfiles code, since
Puppet
>> does not and probably never will provide an analogous feature.
>> Instead, you will need to use something like external templates or
>> create custom Puppet types."
>> From
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/TransitioningFromCfengine
>>
>> If the author specifically focused on managing file contents like
>> entries in /etc/hosts, then puppetd CPU time will be a reflection of
>> how the author extended puppet to edit files.  Perhaps they just did
>> thousands of sed executions, or perhaps they wrote their own custom
>> type or leveraged the flexibility of templates.  Perhaps they used
>> augeas, which is specifically designed for this sort of thing.
>>
>> It sounds like it would have been more apt for the paper to present
>> the experience the author went through to extend puppet to have
>> editfiles functionality.  I would be interested in a paper discussing
>> how cfengine may be extended to support some of the more useful
>> features of puppet.
>>
>> -Jeff McCune
>>
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