[BBLISA] Config management survey

[Rich Braun]

John Stoffel <john at stoffel.org> wrote:
>> Which configuration management software are you currently using?

Chef.  Adam Jacob lives 3 doors over from me so he'd kill me if I switched to
Puppet.

But seriously:  I'm a former puppet user (circa 2007-2011) who got switched to
Chef by a random management decision at my last employer.  Now I'm hooked on
Chef.  There's a big community of Chef developers surrounding me so it's a
straightforward decision to stick with this platform.

However what I've learned lately is that the config-management debate has
moved on from these low-level tools as the devops disciplined has moved into
test-driven infrastructure.  Neither puppet nor chef (nor anything older) has
sufficient instrumentation for solid test design, for which nothing less than
native Ruby will do.  One of the things I like about the choice of Chef is
that it's easy to include native Ruby, along with its unit tests, as library
code within cookbooks or as separately-distributed rubygems.

Why is that needed?  In a word, AWS.  It's stomped all over the CI/CD industry
and become a giant part of my job.  Interfacing with the AWS API is a huge
moving target, and even if you were at an OpenStack shop, you'd have similar
API challenges.

I'm finding myself recruiting Ruby code designers/software engineers rather
than system administrators, in order to handle the escalating need for
developer-test and production deployment systems.

-rich