[BBLISA] Config management survey

[John Miller]

Zach,

Are the Salt manuals the way to go as far as documentation, or is there a
Saltstack book/tutorial out there somewhere?  I'm a complete novice at
Saltstack.

Also, is there an analog to Puppet's Hiera (pluggable database backends) in
Salt?  Hiera really feels like Puppet's killer feature right now.

John


On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Zach McNeilly <zach.mcneilly at gmail.com>
wrote:

> With all the talk of Puppet and Chef, I feel like I really need to jump in
> and promote salt. SaltStack is easy to use, configure, and learn. It's open
> source, and the community is very welcoming towards user contributions. The
> community is fantastic, they quickly patch any bugs, and we really like
> that it's all done in Python because we can run it on any OS we use and
> we're all familiar with Python already.
>
> Some other benefits:
>
> - Salt uses zeromq instead of ssh for remote execution
> - Salt uses simple rsa key pairs for authentication
> - YAML is beautiful
> - We've been using salt for about 8 months (rough estimate) and no one has
> tried to sell us anything.
>
> When it came down to it, yaml, python, and salt's incredible community
> were why we went with it instead of Chef or Puppet.
>
>
> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 10:16 AM, John Miller <johnmill at brandeis.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Curious: what are those Puppet warts you see?  Iteration is my bugbear,
>> but not a huge one.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 1:02 AM, seph <seph at directionless.org> wrote:
>>
>>> > - Which configuration management software are you currently using?
>>> > - If you are switching systems or have switched in the past, what were
>>> your
>>> > reasons?
>>>
>>> While I think puppet is vastly better than what came before it, I think
>>> it has several really ugly language warts. Thankfully, chef fixes
>>> them. I find having all of ruby as the language very freeing.
>>>
>>> I also want to strongly echo richb at pioneer.ci.net comments about the
>>> underlying shifts and discussion about testing and clouds.
>>>
>>> seph
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> John Miller
>> Systems Engineer
>> Brandeis University
>> johnmill at brandeis.edu
>> (781) 736-4619
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> bblisa mailing list
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>>
>
>


-- 
John Miller
Systems Engineer
Brandeis University
johnmill at brandeis.edu
(781) 736-4619
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