The first public beta of Solaris 11.2 is finally available and I am very excited about this release. For some of the highlights check the Oracle Solaris blog.
There is a lot of buzz about the Openstack integration, but for now I am more interested in the integration of the automation framework Puppet. Openstack very likely has a big future and will address IT automation on its own way, but it’s a very new technology.
Puppet on the other hand is in production since many years. But according to my experience, the majority of the users use it for managing Linux systems and not Solaris. With 11.2 Oracle finally embraces Puppet and makes it a lot easier to use the framework for Solaris users.
Building Puppet from source is easy
This post is part of a blog series which tries to simplify the adoption of configuration management frameworks.
As mentioned in the last post, software dependencies can be a blocker for the adoption of configuration management frameworks. In complex or legacy environments where one has several different and antique operating systems versions, even the installation of this frameworks can be painful. Easily too painful for a time saving tool.
About a year ago, I was trying to install the Puppet agent on Solaris 10, Solaris 11 and RHEL 5.x. And it took longer than 5 minutes …
Basically the most install tutorials require to have a current operating system and/or a connection to the Internet from your target systems. These requirements were just not realistic for my target servers at my work place.
Configuration Management Frameworks - Adoption Blockers
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.
Why is this?