I’ve been eyeing crowbar recently, it looks pretty useful and interesting for deploying servers and applications. I haven’t seen much if at all any documentation out there which suggests that people in the digital preservation and archiving fields are implementing systems at scale, I’m under the impression that most systems/sites are building systems up one piece at a time without much automation.
It seems to use chef in the backend for all the automation. I’ve been relearning puppet recently so that I can have reproducible environments with Vagrant.
There might be an advantage to learn and port all the existing modules that I have already created and configured to chef instead of puppet. If I did move to a chef automation in my vagrant environments then a few years from now when we go to full production we might be able to deploy the whole system from bare metal relatively quickly and repeatably.
Automating the deployments will mean that we will have documentation on the infrastructure itself. Either which way there is still a need to automate the fedora-commons, SOLR, mysql and postgres deployments at some point.
After all this thinking and pondering, I’m still using puppet. There’s still the likes of ansible, cfengine, bcfg2 and juju. There is a never ending supply of these tools.
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See Also
- digital preservation and archiving is a hpc problem
- slurm bank that big script for banking in slurm
- a poor mans nas device with ceph
- scientific linux 6 build environment for ceph
- installing ceph on sl6