[Beowulf] anyone using SALT on your clusters?

[Andrew Latham]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 8:27 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> http://blog.smartbear.com/devops/a-taste-of-salt-like-puppet-except-it-doesnt-suck/
>
> A Taste of Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
>
> April 25, 2013 by Corey Quinn 21 Comments
>
>
> Have you gotten frustrated with Puppet? Corey Quinn offers an impassioned
> argument for his favorite open source alternative.
>
> If you’re responsible for the care and feeding of multiple servers, and you
> haven’t heard about configuration management yet, you have not been paying
> attention. CFengine was one of the first configuration management systems
> that was deployed in anything approaching widespread use, and was followed
> later by Puppet and Chef. A bit over two years ago, Salt Stack‘s ”Salt”
> entered the market, and took a radically different approach to the problem of
> “configure all of my servers to do X.”
>
> Salt started life as a remote execution system: a class of software
> applications written to address concerns of the form, “I have this command I
> want to run across 1,000 servers. I want the command to run on all of those
> systems within a five second window. It failed on three of them, and I need
> to know which three.”
>
> [censor censor censor]

Eugen

Saltstack and even Python Fabric are great tools for managing large
numbers of systems. I have not used them with a Beowulf system yet but
the threading and logging for "push" configurations is the best of
both worlds. One great aspect of Python Fabric is the local command
execution so that things like RSH, TFTP and Telnet are possible with
your deployment/configuration system.



-- 
~ Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama at gmail.com http://lathama.net ~