Managing Infrastructure with Puppet – O’Reilly Media: “978-1-4493-0763-9”
I like this paragraph:
Throw Away the Handwritten Notebooks
Now that you’ve learned some Puppet and implemented an automation that does
something useful, I’d like to talk about what it all means in the real world. Configuration
management has been around for a long time, but its nature is changing. When we
used to talk about configuration management, it involved checklists and difficult to
test scripts. Often the policy documents regarding these topics were where 90% of the
effort landed, and even those were not well adhered to. In the new structure that modern
automation provides us, the system configuration can be treated like code. We can put
it in version control, write functional testing suites for it, and QA it just like application
releases. Configurations can have releases that relate to application code releases in
meaningful ways, and bugs are easier to identify because we have explicit records of
changes. So throw away the handwritten server log, and stop making cowboy changes
to production servers. There is a better way.
Now that you’ve learned some Puppet and implemented an automation that does
something useful, I’d like to talk about what it all means in the real world. Configuration
management has been around for a long time, but its nature is changing. When we
used to talk about configuration management, it involved checklists and difficult to
test scripts. Often the policy documents regarding these topics were where 90% of the
effort landed, and even those were not well adhered to. In the new structure that modern
automation provides us, the system configuration can be treated like code. We can put
it in version control, write functional testing suites for it, and QA it just like application
releases. Configurations can have releases that relate to application code releases in
meaningful ways, and bugs are easier to identify because we have explicit records of
changes. So throw away the handwritten server log, and stop making cowboy changes
to production servers. There is a better way.
I hope, quoting it will not bring me in trouble.
Well, nice software, I think!
But how many sys-admins are there out there, that like and use Ruby? Not a lot, I guess.
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