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

["J. Roeleveld" <joost@antarean.org>]

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.

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.

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.

--
Joost