Configuration Management Tool of the Year
 

What is your favorite Configuration Management Tool?

--jeremy

Chef :)

Ansible.

Ansible has been added.

--jeremy

Thanks!

Mine is Vim, but it's not listed. :D

same idea as kikinovak but using pico

Salt Stack.

[Disclosure: I am on the Salt dev team.]

Is this tool similar to YasT?

Jenkins?

SaltStack rocks if for me and has really come on strong in 2013.

Note: Okay, I get that some live and breath vim, but a text editor is NOT a configuration management tool unless you're talking about a very small number of boxes. Try managing a few hundred, much less thousands of systems with vim or pico and this becomes readily apparent.

Peace-- :)

Amazing that Gartner Group's 2013 "Cool Vendor of the Year" product only got 7 votes here in a "Tool of the Year" category. I thought SaltStack had a good chance of at least placing in this one. :confused:

I'm more surprised that Chef only got 12 votes, but the participation in this category is among the lowest for all the polls.

--jeremy

I suspect that is reflective of the target audience, w/exception of Slackers and a few old dogs, a substantial percentage of LQ's target audience are fairly new to maybe intermediate users. Configuration management tools target more enterpirse type users, who 1) tend to be intermediate to advanced, and 2) too busy working for the man to hang out here :-P

I'm a bit confused about it, I work now for almost 20 years with CM tools, but it means something different for us.

Care to elaborate on this? I've been around the block a time or two myself but I'm not sure I get your meaning.

Ok, in short: configuration management itself means (for me) nothing. Almost everything should be configured: a web server, samba, network interface, even vim (the editor) can be configured.
So what do you mean by configuration management? The tools listed are mainly unknown for me. In our company CM means to create a common environment for every software developer around the world (working on the same project) and I think non of the listed tools are suitable for that.

Yes, obviously everything should be configured.

Configuration management tools help you set up and maintain consistency across multiple servers doing multiple tasks, e.g. web server pool, imap server pool, smtp server pool, etc. The idea is to ensure that all servers tasked with a particular duty, e.g. web server, are configured identically.

That way, when something goes wrong, you're debugging in one place rather than searching across multiple machines' conf files looking for that needle in the haystack fat finger typo that somebody made whilst doing some quick edit to solve some other problem. Much easier to find because you're also keeping these configs in a git, subversion, etc. repo so you know precisely what changes were made, when they were made, and by whom.

Additionally, when rolling out additional servers to a particular pool, your config managemet tool ensures that that server gets the exact config it is supposed to. No tiem wasted having to have an admin trawl through the new server's conf and manually edit to taste. Also minimizes risk of errors from typos, etc.,

Of course one big upside to this for the PHB's is that you now need fewer well paid experts, as you can hire much lower end people to drive the config management tools, many of which have clicky interfaces and web based gui clients drivable by relatively low knowledge M$ weenies who are often clueless about _how_ things work but can be quickly brought up to speed on _what_ buttons to push. So the fat cats at the top & bean counters can give themselves a nice pat on the back, impress share holders with their fiduciary responsiblity, all the while skimming more money for themselves.

Some of these tools, e.g. SaltStack also include state management capabilities and thereby provide convenient hooks for monitoring as well.

So it's a big win for overworked sysadmins as well as management. Does this help clarify things a bit?

P.S.; Speaking of typos, I left that fat finger in there to help make the point ;-)

So you misunderstood (what I wanted to say). I work as configuration manager for almost 20 years and I do nothing related what you tried to describe. The tools we have are used in several (very big, large, heavy) international companies, cost a huge amount of dollars. So what is the best CM tool? Why only these tools were listed?

Apparently I have misunderstood you.

I've used commercial offerings like Electric Cloud/Commander. I'll still take SaltStack as the best of breed.