Frameworks like Puppet, Chef, Cfengine, or Salt are now available for some years. Their community is huge and „Automation“ seems to be the answer to almost everything in IT.
Many say: If you do system administration for more than one server and you don’t use a configuration management framework, you do it wrong!
I fully agree with this statement. But according my observation, everybody seems to be interested in using such frameworks, however in reality the adoption rate is quite low.
I think there are many possible blockers, but in my opinion especially the introduction phase of these frameworks is for some complex environments and companies just too hard.
Nowadays I mostly use Puppet, but I also started quite late. Mainly because of stupid reasons, for example like the fear of additional software dependencies and the fact that the popular frameworks did not use my favorite scripting language Python. Newer Python-based frameworks like Salt, need Python 2.6 which was not available on all my target servers.
Anyway, it turned out all the blockers for the introduction of these frameworks can be removed, one by one. I try to address some of the biggest blockers of the introduction of the configuration management framework Puppet in the following posts: