After going to SC13 and being at a few BoF’s and hearing some people talk about their operations and potentially using Salt to replace the likes of puppet and chef, I decided to learn a little more about Salt.
In particular since I have an old laptop lying around at home, I decided to setup a little private cloud. I followed this blog post.
It mostly worked apart from some buggy behaviour in the seeding process. It was certainly lower overhead in setting a salt managed ‘cloud’ than setting up a full on Open Nebula instance or even openstack.
It’s pretty neat that a provisioned VM reports into the salt master and is ready to be provisioned pretty quickly when it boots up. I can certainly see the attraction of using Salt to setup a private cloud with Salt as the controller.
In short compared to Ansible Salt is a bit more heavy weight than Ansible. I haven’t done any like with like comparisons but I do feel that Salt seems like the better option for maintaining long running systems and Ansible is great for rapid redeploys of systems (from a clean state)
I’ve uploaded the configs that I have been using at home to github, they can be found here, there’s even a few packer templates to build base images for CentOS 6.5 and Ubuntu 12.04.
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See Also
- accelerating development and deployments with ansible
- hydra and ansible
- zfs on linux is usable and safe
- building kelvin supercomputer time lapse
- supercomputing 2012 and the arms race to exascale