From: David Lutterkort lutter@redhat.com Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 11:17:19 -0700
On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 10:11 -0400, John R. Dunning wrote: > I don't like the idea of joining services and puppet at the hip, > mostly because I think it's important to be able to talk about > services in slightly more abstract terms. I care about the semantics, > not the underpinnings. And more pragmatically, there are lots of > people in the world for whom puppet is a big and wrongly-shaped > hammer.
There's two slightly different issues at play here: (1) the config server we use to support our tooling (2) the config server that users use to do their bidding.
Clearly, for (2), users will use whatever they have and feel comfortable with; for (1) we should use whatever we can make work.
Given this discussion, there's no doubt that (1) will have to be reasonably close in functionality to puppet that we might as well use it.
I totally disagree with that statement.
Remember the model we've been pushing explicitly does not count on loading packages at launch time. This is not to say we want to preclude it, but forcing people into that model has been judged to be a Bad Thing (tm). So we have a fairly elaborate set of stuff to allow for getting all your images prebuilt, such that the only thing you need to supply at launch is the "last few inches" (much less than the last mile) of config, specific to this particular deployment. And for that, puppet is a way larger hammer than needed.
Again, we don't propose to get in the way of people who want to use puppet masters and stuff for other reasons. Same goes for any kind of update pushed via kalpana, or whatever. But for the purposes of launch-this-prebuilt-image-and-hand-it-some-parameters, puppet is overkill.