On Feb 7, 2012, at 2:00 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
Ruby seems like the only thing that might be worse than python in terms of long-term version incompatibilities and installation problems, although python is sort-of a special case on RH systems since the install tools need it. I think something I wrote 20 years ago should still run today, but maybe that's just me. And I didn't see any way to tier puppet masters or keep it from falling over with a large number of clients.
---- seems to me that a lot of the people who love perl also love ruby - learning curve is not steep.
puppet clients are forgiving - you can use stock ruby from CentOS 5
puppet manifests won't expire because of changes in ruby rather because of changes in puppet but a startup at this point should be fine for many years as the path forward seems pretty well defined.
There's a lot of scaling possibilities for puppet master and a single master should be able to handle 200-300 servers without much difficulty and there are organizations that scale well into the thousands on puppet but yes, that does require some sophistication. FWIW, I'm just a hair under 50 servers and I'm running the puppet master on a VMWare image of 768MB.
Craig