Server management on daily basis in a growing environment could be a challenge. Most of the tasks is here done with ClusterSSH in help with a homebrew mail notification.
Unfortunately this workflow is not scaling well for 200+ systems. I had a look into apt-dater but this seems not to fit our workflow. FAI looks a bit over-engineered at the first glance.
Maybe Puppet is an option? There seems to be many extensions for it, unfortunately ruby is needed on every single node. Is there a CTO-compatible overview about puppet, any other alternatives? ;)
Update: Many thanks for the hints from André Luís Lopes, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen, Phil Miller, Steve Kemp, Andrew Latham, Bob Proulx and Natxo Asenjo
- Chef
- Packaged in Debian
- Upstream Debian packages (no recent one)
- CFEngine3
- No ruby/perl/python dependencies
- Light, fast
- (A bit) harder to understand
- Packaged in Debian
- Upstream Debian packages
- Salt
- Very young
- Packaged in Debian
- Ansible
- MCollective
- Framework for building server orchestration and parallel job execution
- Could extend for example Puppet or Chef
- Packaged in Debian
- Upstream Debian packages (no recent one)
- Foreman
- Puppet dashboard and node classifier
- Open ITP
- Upstream Debian packages
Old but conceptual still valid: www.infrastructures.org, for example Bootstrapping an Infrastructure
Other thoughts: push- or pull-infrastructure? Software footprint (on nodes and your central instance)!
Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info'.