fossified/podcast

Topic: Configuration Management utilities - which to choose?

Opened this issue · 2 comments

stdevel commented

Finding the right configuration management can be a daunting task. The "big four" consist of: Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet and Chef - making it hard for newcomers to make a decision.
Every tool has its benefits and drawbacks - that could be explained more details for the listeners.
Which tool is the easiest to start with? What scales best? Which has the brightest future?

Agenda proposal

  • Motivation
    • Why use configuration management?
    • Typical use cases
  • Tool overview and history
    • Ansible
    • SaltStack
    • Puppet
    • Chef
  • Paradigms, design and features
    • Push vs. Pull
    • Agent-based vs. agent-less
    • Imperative vs. declarative paradigms
    • Remote Execution
    • Language
    • Content communities
  • Additional frontends and tools
    • AWX / Ansible Semaphore
    • ARA
    • SaltGUI / Alcali
  • Tips, Do's and Don'ts

Estimated duration: ~120 minutes.

DianaOlympos commented

Adding to the list of questions:

  • Are any of these the future or has the progress and innovation stalled now that "cloud" and "immutable infra" is such a movement?
  • If yes, what are the tools exploring the fringes (I think of Nix and Guix here, Habitat was an experiment, but there are probably others)
  • 👍1
stdevel commented

Guix and Nix are very interesting topics as well! Would be worth it giving those a dedicated episode to cover all the relevant details IMHO.