EEFY!  

So for work I’ve been investigating the use of a centralized unified configuration management tool for all *nix (and ESX) hosts throughout geo locations, the idea would be to actually ensure we had a unified configuration. Over time scope creep for things that you don’t actually log into, or as you move through a fast moving enviroment (like ours) things change, and there’s not the time to go back and fix this.

What I’ve been researching is essentially the way to define a role throughout our infrastructure for say RHEL5 Web Server, and then as soon as they deliver the server online, it checks in, and wham it’s got what it needs and then over time as we change things, it’s easily maintained. While investigating here’s an interesting video that’s come up, the people are:

• Igal Koshevoy of AutomateIt
• Brendan Strejcek of Cfengine
• Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs for Puppet
• Narayan Desai of bcfg2
• Adam Jacob from Opscode for Chef

While they don’t argue much, my honest opinions are that right now my favourite is Chef, their latest release removes the nasty openID requirement, which is GREAT. I’m not sure how well any of them scale at this time, but thus far my attempts with puppet have been little more than unfortunate failure, probably on my part, but nothing about it makes me want to rush forward. However while I’ve not given Chef a good and proper go, it’s got the most pleasant community, nicest site, and the fastest responses / releases I’ve seen of the lot!

I’ll update with things about my foray into Chef over the next few days.

Patrick