[Cialug] System/Configuration Management; was: Re: Most reliable backup solution

[Thomas Kula]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 09:49:01AM -0600, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> Yeah, that's a good idea. For me, there are two things stopping me:
> 
> I think that both Chef and Puppet are boring. I try to read the docs and
> tutorials and my eyes glaze over (I'm open to suggestions that are short
> and practical).

As soon as you manage more than zero systems, invest some time and
effort into learning and using some sort of system configuration
management system. People have already mentioned
Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt Stack. I've had great luck with Salt, at $JOB
we're using Chef, and Ansible looks interesting. Find one that works
well for you and stick with it. All of them support putting your
configuration files into git. Treat your systems like you treat code.
Find all special snowflakes and melt them into oblivion. 

At $JOB[-1], where I had the most automation set up, the systems I had
fully automated I could blow away and have back in 15 minutes, most of
which was waiting for Kickstart to blast bits on disk. That right there
is a huge win. Also, after you set up some complex piece of software,
how long do you remember everything you do? If you use a CM system
properly, you don't have to --- all the steps will be there. How many
times have you tried to re-create something and spend a day debugging
getting it to work properly, only to find you forgot to set something in
a file buried somewhere? Why did $COWORKER, who left six months ago, put
some non-obvious setting in a file? If you do things properly, you'll
find the git commit where that setting was made, see the commit message,
find a link to your ticketing system. This takes some discipline, but it
pays off in spades. 

I usually found that major tasks (creating a base image, automating our
Solr deployments, configuring Nginx sanely) each took about 40 hours of
work. The first time. Every time after that? Five minutes. I think
you'll find that there's a bit of a effort curve when you start out, but
a bit of the way in you'll reach a critical threshold where using the CM
will rapidly pay off for you. 


-- 
Thomas L. Kula | kula at tproa.net | http://kula.tproa.net/