[Beowulf] anyone using SALT on your clusters?

[Eugen Leitl]

http://blog.smartbear.com/devops/a-taste-of-salt-like-puppet-except-it-doesnt-suck/

A Taste of Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

April 25, 2013 by Corey Quinn 21 Comments


Have you gotten frustrated with Puppet? Corey Quinn offers an impassioned
argument for his favorite open source alternative.

If you’re responsible for the care and feeding of multiple servers, and you
haven’t heard about configuration management yet, you have not been paying
attention. CFengine was one of the first configuration management systems
that was deployed in anything approaching widespread use, and was followed
later by Puppet and Chef. A bit over two years ago, Salt Stack‘s ”Salt”
entered the market, and took a radically different approach to the problem of
“configure all of my servers to do X.”

Salt started life as a remote execution system: a class of software
applications written to address concerns of the form, “I have this command I
want to run across 1,000 servers. I want the command to run on all of those
systems within a five second window. It failed on three of them, and I need
to know which three.”

[censor censor censor]