[sf-perl] lack of perl in config management - problem?

Philip J. Hollenback philiph at pobox.com
Fri Dec 16 11:27:11 PST 2011


Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your
newsletter.

I look forward to your presentation!

P.

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011, at 11:18 AM, Earl Ruby wrote:
> When my company first started building servers en masse about 8 years
> ago we knew we needed a configuration management tool and looked at
> what open source tools were available at that time. At that time none
> met our needs, so we ended up writing our own, mostly in Perl with
> some bash.
>
> Our goals were:
>
> * We wanted to be able to easily integrate new configuration scripts
>   into the framework.
> * We wanted to be able to stage changes on staging/QA servers and then
>   move them into production.
> * We wanted a class hierarchy, so that we could assign a server to
>   multiple classes (e.g. "base", "base-sanfrancisco", "apache-server",
>   "admin-tools").
> * Each class can override configurations in the parent class, so "apache-
>   server" would build a base Apache server, and "admin-tools" would
>   install web-based administration tools, some of which might override
>   the settings in the apache-server class.
> * Each host can also have host-specific settings which override the
>   base classes, so if you need to tweak settings on just one host
>   you can.
> * We wanted to be easily able to tell what configuration had been
>   applied to any host, and to keep all of the configurations in one
>   place. If you want to understand why something is set up in a
>   certain way on a host, it's easy to find the configuration and see
>   what script made which changes.
> * We wanted to be able to lock down specific versions of an OS, its
>   patch set, CPAN tools, and our own packages, so that every server is
>   built using the exact same versions of all software packages.
> * We wanted new servers to automatically plug themselves into our
>   Nagios monitoring system.
> * We wanted to be able to take any server, reboot it, type 'inst-auto'
>   at the boot: prompt, and have it go from bare metal to fully-
>   configured without any additional manual intervention.
>
> We built all that, but maintaining it takes time, and it's not our
> core competency, so we looked at moving to Chef or Puppet. What we
> found is that neither Chef nor Puppet implements classes the way we
> have and neither one gives us the one-button build capability that we
> wanted. Chef scales and scales, but is a huge undertaking to set up
> and maintain. Puppet runs out of steam somewhere between 100 and 1000
> servers, and is difficult to scale beyond that. Our system scales
> infinitely, and it's dead-simple to set up an understand.
>
> We looked at extending Chef or Puppet using the tools we'd written,
> then realized that what we'd written was actually pretty damn good. We
> are currently working to strip out the company-specific parts of the
> framework, clean up the code, and release it as open source. We hope
> that by doing so that other system engineers can extend it and add
> capabilities that we would like to have but don't have time to add
> ourselves.
>
> We will probably be doing an initial release in about 3 months. I'd be
> happy to do a demo for Perl Mongers when it's released.
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Philip J. Hollenback
> <philiph at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Something I'm thinking about - a lot of sysadmins these days are
> > becoming programmers via their need to use config management.  The
> > two big config management tools are Chef and Puppet.  Both are ruby-
> > based.
> >
> > So you have lots of people coming to scripting for the first time,
> > and they are using ruby.  Is that a problem?  Does this mean that a
> > generation of sysadmins is coming of age _not_ using perl?
> >
> > I don't have any firm data on this, but it's my sense that a lack of
> > config management tools based in perl is actively hurting the perl
> > community.
> >
> > Oh and yes, I'm aware of Slaughter, but I don't think it is enough
> > of a major player to count.  Also, it's not very actively
> > maintained.
> >
> > Anyway, what do people think about this issue?  Has anyone
> > analyzed it?
> >
> > Final question: perl is such a wonderful glue language - why isn't
> > there a major config management tool based in perl?
> >
> > I'm hoping I'm wrong about all of this of course.
> >
> > P.
> > --
> > Philip J. Hollenback philiph at pobox.com www.hollenback.net
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > SanFrancisco-pm mailing list SanFrancisco-pm at pm.org
> > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/sanfrancisco-pm
>
>
>
> --
> Earl Ruby http://earlruby.org/
> _______________________________________________
> SanFrancisco-pm mailing list SanFrancisco-pm at pm.org
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>
--  
Philip J. Hollenback
philiph at pobox.com
www.hollenback.net



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