Re: Is Puppet similar to Capistrano?

On 10/8/07, Brandorr <brandorr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I discovered Capistrano while I was trying to figure out what I
> wanted. See attached notes.
> http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/GNOSIS/Kraken
>
> Puppet seems promising.

I just read your wiki entry.  You should consider contributing to
Factor, for your system inventory needs.  Puppet is a significant part
of an open source data center management tool, and is a much better
integration choice than cfengine (imnsho.)

Having written two or three systems like the one you are describing in
the past (including iClassify today) I suggest you do a few things:

1. You need to keep the schema flexible, since you never know what
sort of thing people need to track.  If you find yourself writing a
new class for each entity you need to track in your datacenter
(server, router, switch, rack, pdu, et al) then you're off track.

2. You need to allow for the expression of relationships between
entities.  For example, a server is in a rack.  This is best done
fairly loosely.  iClassify doesn't do this at all right now, although
I have some ideas about how it might.

3. Use a full text search engine like Xapian, Solr, Ferret or Lucene.
One of these models used Xapian entirely, and had no relational
database engine at all.  Thus far, it remains my favorite of my
implementations of this problem for flexibility. In the end, you can't
beat saying "tags:database AND mysql-master:true", or
"ipaddress:[192.168.1.0-192.168.10.0]".

4. As much as possible, entities need to be responsible for reporting
in to the management system. They should push data to it, it should
not be polling the entities for updates. (Where possible.  Sometimes,
you have to poll.)

I could go on. :)

There is lots of work going on in this space right now in the puppet
community at large, and if would be excellent if it would include the
work you are already planning for.

Regards,
Adam
-- 
HJK Solutions - We Launch Startups - http://www.hjksolutions.com
Adam Jacob, Senior Partner
T: (206) 508-4759 E: adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx