[ale] Todays trends

[JD]

> A Puppet set up I encountered as my IT career was ending had a similar problem,
> but it tended to hold everything back; whenever you wanted to advance anything -
> change to a new version of a Linux distribution (if you're stuck in that kind of
> goat-rope) or introduce a new distribution - you had to drag the Puppet
> implementation along collaterally and it seemed as though people would rather
> run ancient versions of stuff and suffer those consequences than do the
> dragging.  If anything, it seemed to me that Puppet and the like get used to
> facilitate practices that shouldn't be occurring in the first place:  server
> overprofileration.

Excellent discussion.  Losely coupled systems handle upgrades a little easier.

Puppet seems to be the "buzzword" of choice in Linux admin circles.  I attended
the Free Puppet Labs day at GA-Tech last year with about 200 others to learn a
little more.  In that room about 10% were like me - there to learn more.  2%
were using Puppet to manage EVERYTHING and the rest were their with some issue,
but seemed mostly happy.  It felt like an Microsoft event to me.  Lots of users
complained about certificate management.  Seemed like that was going to be the
problem that everyone - -  EVERYONE -- hit.

OTOH, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of Puppet-related positions either.
Getting paid is an important part of life and if you work on a puppet install -
I don't think that work will ever be complete (sorta like MS patching?).
Continuous employment is good.

I just couldn't get on-board with a system that mandated I install Ruby on every
server. Couldn't do it.  Build on something that is already on every server I
own please and isn't considered a CPU hog. That would be nice.  Rex and Ansible
fit those requirements - though ansible can go off and never come back ...
never.  Sure, it was a bug in my setup, but still.  Ansible isn't a popular as
Puppet and most people haven't heard of Rex.

Of course, any admin who hasn't tried to invent this deployment/CMDB system via
scripting themselves is probably not really a pro, came from a point-n-click
land or only has 5 boxes.