[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

[Karanbir Singh]

On 11/04/2009 02:18 PM, Marcus Moeller wrote:
> We had massive performance issues with Puppet<  0.25 and Mogrel/Webrick.

Right, I dont think that the default out of the box setup with Webrick 
is meant to scale much beyond 100 or so machines, but its trivial to 
setup nginx based proxy in front of multiple mongrels and have that 
handle the load. Anything > 500  nodes needs specific consideration, but 
then at that level you have both the time and the interest to fix the 
specific issues.

> Concerning Ruby you should at least be familiar with quoting/escaping
> and scopes.

I think the puppet DSL is slightly different from ruby in that way. Just 
working with the language guide for puppet is enough to keep things 
going. Its only when you get down to lower level embedded templates with 
erb that it might help knowing a bit of ruby, but I do honestly think 
most people can do almost everything on puppet without any ruby experience.

> There are not so may packages that needs to be installed on client
> side (about 10)

How about the server side? puppet is still a single package on that end too.

> but in conclusion you will get functionalities like
> remote-commands through osad and monitoring. The package upgrades
> could be handled with errata and update management easily.

with puppet you get the ability to carry role based nagios definitions 
in sync with the role definition - which almost means zero nagios 
configuration.  So what that means is that when I define what my 
webserver-type1 should look like and what configs its needs and what 
policy it needs to implement I can also define, at the same place, what 
sort of monitoring would be needed against those components. Then when I 
apply webserver-type1 to any specific machine, I get the nagios configs 
for free.

And the fact that puppet runs in a definite manner, it can make for a 
reactive monitoring system in itself ( although I prefer to use tools 
like monit / god for that - specially for time critical services ).

>> PS: Your email client is broken. Its not preserving thread sanity.
> Not a problem here.

Interestingly for your email : Message-ID: 
<g1m1yig5etitfc1rxzjezwJv4X.penango at mail.gmail.com>

The headers contain no References or in-reply-to headers on the copy 
that came through to me ( your most recent one does have References set 
). So not sure what mailclient you are using, but its a bit random on 
its headers.

- KB
-- 
Karanbir Singh
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