[kwlug-disc] [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Saltstack, XMPP, IRC (June 2017)

[B.S.]

On 06/03/2017 02:41 AM, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-announce wrote:
> 
> In this world of spinning up virtual machines on demand, the concept 
> of configuration management -- specifying a server's configuration
> in some text-editable, version-controllable files and deploying them
> to new machines easily -- is pretty popular. Who knew? In the past
> we have had presentations on Puppet and Ansible; this month we will
> get salty. Nathan Fish has been working extensively with the Salt
> (aka SaltStack) configuration management system at his work, and he
> has lots of lessons to share...

The need for common configuration across machines has recently become
itchier for me. So far I've only had time to do some wikipedia and other
page reading. I see out there, at least, anisble, chef, cfengine,
puppet, salt, and many others if only in passing, e.g. otter.

I had made a mental note to myself to check further into Salt - nice
timing for SaltStack (?) information.

Any amount of info seeking quickly has one realizing this is all the
thin edge of a much larger wedge. Configuration is one thing -
maintenance, confirmation, inventory, monitoring, being others. Clearly
my own personal infrastructure is lacking in many areas. It certainly
isn't clear to me where the starting point / logical sequence of steps
begins.

One thing I came across in my browsing was
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFEngine) "Rather than describing the
steps needed to make a change, CFEngine language describes the final
state in which one wants to end up. The agent then ensures that the
necessary steps are taken to end up in this "policy compliant state".
Thus, CFEngine can be run again and again, whatever the initial state of
a system, and it will end up with a predictable result. CFEngine
supports the item of statistical compliance with policy, meaning that a
system can never guarantee to be exactly in an ideal or desired state,
rather one approaches (converges) towards the desired state by
best-effort, at a rate that is determined by the ratio of the frequency
of environmental change to the rate of CFEngine execution."

The idea of describing where you want to get to, not a script to take
you from wherever you are to where you want to go, makes intuitive
sense. How to incorporate that approach into a tool ... not so much.

Looking forward to this and Bob.