Application configuration management

[Ravi]

Hi,

Is there any good application configuration management tool suggested by this toolchain group ? 

My company has failed attempts to use ControlTier. We are now leaning towards building in-house tool. 

But before we build any tool, wanted to check the devops community's opinion. 

[Sarkis Varozian]

Both puppet and chef should provide you with everything you need to get going.

Check out:

www.puppetlabs.com

www.opscode.com

I recently evaluated both of these recently and chose Puppet for our setup.

--
Sarkis Varozian
svar...@gmail.com
P. (818) 436 - 9892
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[Ravi]

Thanks, although I thought they were more of system configuration based on the toolchain diagram : 

http://dev2ops.org/toolchain/ 

---

From: Sarkis Varozian <svar...@gmail.com>
To: devops-t...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: Application configuration management

[Anthony Shortland]

Hi Ravi,

Over the last couple of years the ControlTier project has evolved a successful spin-off called Rundeck (www.rundeck.org) which when combined with other tools (such as Puppet and Chef as Sarkis has mentioned) forms a loosely-coupled tool-chain (see: http://dtolabs.com/wiki/Deployment_management_tool_architecture) for application configuration management and deployment automation.

A hallmark of tool-chains like this is web API integration presenting interfaces against which you can build your own tooling ... so you can have your cake and eat it!

Thanks,

Anthony.

[Francois Armand]

Look also to CFEngine 3[1], it may be a good alternatives if you are looking for something with a realy low footprint agent, extremely powerful, and to Rudder [2] if you prefer something with a nice web interface.

Thanks,

[1] http://cfengine.org
[2] http://rudder-project.com

[Dan Nemec]

We're using Control Tier as our Orchestration component (will one day switch to RunDeck) and Chef for application configuration. We use Chef to configure a suite of about 30 Java applications: some webapps in Tomcat, and some standalone console apps. We went from managing thousands of config files by hand in subversion to managing tens of role files in Chef. We started with Chef for application configuration and are just adding in some system configuration. If you model your environment well and fit into a few constraints Chef has, it works really well for application configuration. In the next few weeks I'll be documenting what we're doing (right now we're finishing the final rollouts to production). I wrote a bit about it at a high level last year on my blog http://blog.geeksgonemad.com/2011/01/chef-is-my-documentation.html.

If you decide on Chef and I haven't posted anything new on my blog, feel free to email me.

BTW, we use Chef to generate the object XML for Control Tier (The Control Tier files got really difficult to manage by hand). Now we have our Control Tier configuration 100% data driven by Chef to the point that our cookbook can tear down and rebuild a project from scratch.

Dan

[Nathaniel Eliot]

We wrote Ironfan (our specialization of Chef for clusters in the
clouds: https://github.com/infochimps-labs/ironfan ) for all
configuration management at Infochimps, irrespective of layer. Where
we don't use it to manage something, it's because the cost of finding
or writing the adapter is not yet worth the savings in wear on fingers
(e.g. - Ironfan handles the subscription of nodes to a load-balancer,
but not the initial creation of the balancer, which only happens once
at most per major architectural project).

We will be using Rundeck to handle orchestration, but it's likely to
remain somewhat secondary. We're finding that many things work
perfectly well via choreography, using the Chef Server as a central
store of truth when needed, and that an orchestrator would only add
another SPOF.

--
Nathaniel Eliot
T9 Productions

[jtimberman]

On Wednesday, March 14, 2012 3:46:20 PM UTC-6, Ravi wrote:

Is there any good application configuration management tool suggested by this toolchain group ? 

Chef was designed to be used as both a configuration management system, and a framework for providing configuration management and system integration as a library. The power of the system integration is exposed via the Chef Server's RESTful API, often through its Search indexes. You can use its library of primitives to compose the kind of system you need, and there are a number of side projects by Opscode and others available:

The chef-rundeck RubyGem integrates Chef with Rundeck:

* http://rubygems.org/gems/chef-rundeck

Spice is a Chef Server API wrapper to help integrate the RESTful API of the server into an application using Ruby:

* http://rubygems.org/gems/spice 

If you want something for Java (and Clojure), you might be interested in jclouds's Chef integration:

* https://github.com/jclouds/jclouds-chef/wiki/Quick-Start

The Chef Server API is documented here:

* http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Server+API

If you want to build plugins for Knife (Chef's command-line tool), documentation is here:

* http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Knife+Plugins

This blog post has information about using the Chef Search API:

* http://erik.hollensbe.org/blog/2012/02/24/abusing-the-chef-api-for-fun-and-profit/

Hope this helps!

[Stan Chan]

I'm going to suggest a wonderful tool called Glu.  It has similarities to RunDeck and is highly scalable, since it was designed using RESTful principals and uses Hadoop's ZooKeeper to synchronize data across fabrics.  It's being used at Linkedin on around 3000 physical servers with 9000 application instances running over 300 services.  Application deployments are modeled using JSON and works great with highly iterative application lifecycles, closing the loop with CI systems like Jenkins.  Also, works well when coupled with Chef and/or Puppet.

http://linkedin.github.com/glu/docs/latest/html/index.html

[GeekInSuit]

Hi Ravi,

I'm interested in understanding your failed attempts to use ControlTier? 

Have you done a post-mortem on the attempt? Is it tools or something else

Thanks

GeekInSuit