Re: [gentoo-user] Ansible, puppet and chef

[J. Roeleveld]

On Wednesday, September 17, 2014 10:12:52 AM Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 17/09/2014 09:34, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> > On Tuesday, September 16, 2014 10:43:18 PM Alan McKinnon wrote:
> >> Anyone here used ansible and at least one of puppet/chef?
> >>
> >> What are your thoughts?
> >>
> >> I've made several attempts over the years to get puppet going but never
> >> really got it off the ground. Chef I stay away from (likely due to the
> >> first demo of it I saw and how badly that went....)
> >>
> >> Puppet seems to me a good product for a large site with 1000 hosts.
> >> Not so much for ~20 or so. Plus puppet's language and configs get large
> >> and hard to keep track of - lots and lots of directory trees with many
> >> things mentioning other things. (Nagios has the same problem if you
> >> start keeping host, services, groups and commands in many different
> >> files)
> >>
> >> I've stumbled upon ansible, it seems much better than puppet for
> >> smallish sites with good odds I might even keep the whole thing in my
> >> head at any one time :-)
> >>
> >> Anyone care to share experiences?
> >
> > No experiences yet, but I have been looking for options to quickly and
> > easily create (and remove) VMs lab environments.
>
> Have you tried Vagrant?

Nope.

> I haven't tried it myself, I'm just reacting to the "VM" keyword ;-)

Yes, but it doesn't have support for Xen or KVM and I'd need to write a custom 
"provider" to make that work.
That basically does what I am looking into, but with the products we work 
with, I need more custom activities in some of the VMs then are easily 
organised.

> > I agree with your comments on Chef and Puppet.
> > Ansible looks nice and seems easy to manage. I miss an option to store the
> > configuration inside a database, but I don't see an issue adding the
> > generation of the config-files from database tables to the rest of the
> > environment I am working on.
>
> Ansible has an add-on called Tower that seems to do this. The marketing
> blurb implies you can use almost any storage backend you like from MySQL
> and PostGres to LDAP

Ok, from a quick scan of that page, it looked like a web frontend for some 
stuff. I'll definitely look into that part. The rest is more custom, so I 
might just generate the config files on the fly.

> > I like that Ansible also seems to support MS Windows nodes, just too bad
> > that requires enabling it after install. But with this, cloning VMs and
> > changing the network configs afterwards seems easier to manage.
>
> I'm lucky, this is a Unix-only shop so I don't have to deal with Windows
> servers. The three managers who have Windows laptops for varying reasons
> have all been clearly told upfront they will support themselves and I
> ain't touching it :-)

Not all products we deal with run on non-MS Windows systems, so we are sort-of 
stuck with it. They only run inside VMs that are only accessible via the LAB 
network. Which means, no access to the internet unless specifically allowed. 
(The host and port on the internet needs to be known prior to allowing access)

--
Joost