[python-uk] Salt Stack meetup drink in London

[John Lee]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012, Rachid Belaid wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have been in touch with the people behind Salt Stack :
> http://saltstack.org/
>
> One of the developers is coming next week to do some training on Salt.
[...]

The usual suspect in this field is puppet.  Puppet has a lot of users, so 
presumably a lot of canned, working configuration components.  So, a 
question for those more clued-in than me about puppet: What problems does 
it leave us with -- through omission or commission -- that Salt Stack 
solves, or might solve?  Problems *other than* not being written in 
Python!

(Like perhaps lots of people, I've worked with in house home-grown 
puppet-like systems, but not puppet itself.)

The github readme focuses more on features than the problems that it 
solves over the status quo, and does not mention puppet, but hints at 
problems in other systems with:

  * covering the whole range from small to large numbers of hosts

  * working with multiple geographical sites

and in the Randall Schwartz interview video, I think these were mentioned:

  * execution time for operations on large numbers of hosts, and where
    the command to run depends on information gathered from those hosts
    rather than from a central database

  * lack of polymorphism across systems (example mentioned was a
    generic "install this package" command in Salt)

  * verbosity of puppet configurations


If you consider being written in Python significant (and I guess I do, to 
some extent) the same question goes for bcfg2, and any other similar tools 
written in Python.  And also for <favourite deployment system here>!


John