mirceaulinic

Built a tiny tool to measure TCP & UDP latency. Wrote up the why and how.

TL;DR: Salt is complex, multi-purpose tool, with event-driven orchestration and remote execution engine capabilities. In other words, it implicitly does what Ansible can do, plus many other things. What I personally like the most is the ease to develop and extend features, vs., e.g., a clogged DSL as many popular tools (unfortunately) impose.

Yes, I know, and I completely agree. It was meant initially to be a pun, and nobody expected back then the library would eventually so much traction. Even worse, I personally was giving a talk in Vietnam a couple of years ago, and you can probably imagine that I felt like an ass.

It has been discussed indeed, but unfortunately nobody volunteered yet to take the entire work of re-documenting everything and many other things that have to be done. But it's definitely something intended for the future.

From what I heard (I never had so many devices to manage myself), Salt can scale nicely when managing a very large number of devices - see for example this story from LinkedIn: https://s.saltstack.com/saltstack-at-web-scale-better-strong.... However, they're using it in the "classical" topology which is agent based. For non-agent base, you may consider looking into Salt-SSH: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/ssh/. Hope this helps!

Such a sad place, makes me feel bad whenever I have to go there. This is one of the main reasons I cut my travels to SF, I just can see that poverty, it's against my life principles.

I had prior experience with other programming / scripting languages, and picking Python up felt very natural.

I started with Mark Lutz's Learning Python (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596513986.do) about 10 years ago. In the meanwhile I've been an active contributor to large Python-based open source projects, e.g., Salt (https://github.com/saltstack/salt) which not only that it helped me get feedback from people with a tremendous experience, but also reading through the code taught me good practices and many good ways to solve various problems. A few months ago I started reading Luciano Ramalho's Fluent Python (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032519.do) which is just beautifully written and with a wide variety of topics for a deeper look inside Python internals.

I manage my infrastructure using Salt, which can also be used to schedule jobs (both Salt and outside Salt jobs), see https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/jobs/index.html