Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)
by busterarm on Thursday May 17, 2018 @02:45AM
(#17089318)
I've used chef, ansible and saltstack in small startup and large scale enterprise environments.
Ansible is just about the easiest and most flexible thing going, but once you hit "very large scale" you're going to get bit by its performance and start worrying about when you actually update things. Ansible Tower starts to look good then, but it's not the well-walked path and brings you all sorts of other issues about how you distribute secrets to bootstrap things.
Chef is kind of nice when you don't have a lot of environments that you need to manage and about as flexible as you need it to be in those situations.
SaltStack shines when you really have a lot of heavy lifting to do and the Event System, Beacons and Reactors will honestly blow your mind with the complex things you can achieve in a way that's simple to reason about and maintain.
That said, there's really like 3-4 majorly different ways you can (or would want to) use Salt and understanding it and its documentation is a large cognitive investment. You will likely run into major pain at some point down the road if you choose to use it. I would only use it again if I had a really good reason to -- pretty much if there's no other alternative. I would not at all bother using it to try and do typical sysadmin automation tasks.
Strange side-note: The best managed Salt environments I've worked in or looked at were all masterless, whether at small or massive scale. It's my probably-wrong opinion that traditional master/minion SaltStack is always going to cause you enormous problems eventually when you need to either scale out or pivot on something.
Ansible is just about the easiest and most flexible thing going, but once you hit "very large scale" you're going to get bit by its performance and start worrying about when you actually update things. Ansible Tower starts to look good then, but it's not the well-walked path and brings you all sorts of other issues about how you distribute secrets to bootstrap things.
Chef is kind of nice when you don't have a lot of environments that you need to manage and about as flexible as you need it to be in those situations.
SaltStack shines when you really have a lot of heavy lifting to do and the Event System, Beacons and Reactors will honestly blow your mind with the complex things you can achieve in a way that's simple to reason about and maintain.
That said, there's really like 3-4 majorly different ways you can (or would want to) use Salt and understanding it and its documentation is a large cognitive investment. You will likely run into major pain at some point down the road if you choose to use it. I would only use it again if I had a really good reason to -- pretty much if there's no other alternative. I would not at all bother using it to try and do typical sysadmin automation tasks.
Strange side-note: The best managed Salt environments I've worked in or looked at were all masterless, whether at small or massive scale. It's my probably-wrong opinion that traditional master/minion SaltStack is always going to cause you enormous problems eventually when you need to either scale out or pivot on something.