[CentOS] Kickstarting several *different* setups

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:53 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote:
>
> On Tue, January 20, 2015 18:37, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>> There's also saltstack which is one of the newer of the bunch.  It has
>> some chance of working reasonably across different platforms.   How
>> you feel about it will probably depend on how you feel about python in
>> general - and how you expect upgrades to go in the future.
>>
>
> Is this what you are talking about?
>
> Available Packages
> salt.noarch             2014.7.0-3.el6        epel
> salt-api.noarch         2014.7.0-3.el6        epel
> salt-cloud.noarch       2014.7.0-3.el6        epel
> salt-master.noarch      2014.7.0-3.el6        epel
> salt-minion.noarch      2014.7.0-3.el6        epel
> salt-ssh.noarch         2014.7.0-3.el6        epel
> salt-syndic.noarch      2014.7.0-3.el6        epel

Yes - the architecture is that you run one central salt master and a
large number of salt-minions can connect to it and salt-syndic works
as sort-of a proxy for even larger sets.   It is somewhat
cross-platform but with the caveat that the master should be updated
to newer versions ahead of the minions and epel is one of the slower
repositories to get updates.   I haven't gone beyond simple testing
myself because I think it shouldn't be more trouble to manage
updates/compatibility on a configuration manager than just managing
your own app in the first place.   But we tend to make few changes
beyond version updates once a system is deployed.  If you regularly
spin totally new clusters up and down all the time I could see how it
could save time.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com