3 ms·

means you're depending on sysadmins to write code You're not seriously suggesting to give the management of a complex deployment into the hands of a person who

by moe 15y ago

means you're depending on sysadmins to write code You're not seriously suggesting to give the management of a complex deployment into the hands of a person who can't program? With restrictive, structured language you can still provide for all the features they've built into their types/manifests/gencode/etc without relying on someone being able to program. Sorry, it's delusional to think you could operate puppet without being able to program. In theory the puppet language is said to be "not quite turing complete" or "mostly declarative". In reality there is no such difference. It's just a (poorly designed) programming language with domain-specific constraints. It does have all the concepts that give non-programmers headache: variables, classes, parametrizable classes, defines, inheritance, etc. And on top of that you better know your ruby, too, because you won't get away without writing custom types, resources and functions. So... your admin is not just using the language - he's also extending it!

cagenut 15y ago
I'm a sysadmin, who can't program, who has setup and used puppet very successfully at two different comscore top-100 sites to provide faster, more reproducible builds with better revision tracking and change control. There's nothing delusional about it, its working quite well and I'm being payed quite well.
peterwwillis 15y ago
You're not seriously suggesting to give the management of a complex deployment into the hands of a person who can't program? No. I'm suggesting giving the maintenance of the "code" portion of a deployment system to a developer, and having that developer craft it in such a way that a trained monkey can write a couple lines of metadata and have it deploy pretty much whatever you need. Which is how it worked for us in the past (and worked quite well). I'm sorry but I think you misunderstood me; I was never talking about Puppet.

by moe 15y ago

cagenut 15y ago

I'm a sysadmin, who can't program, who has setup and used puppet very successfully at two different comscore top-100 sites to provide faster, more reproducible builds with better revision tracking and change control. There's nothing delusional about it, its working quite well and I'm being payed quite well.

peterwwillis 15y ago

You're not seriously suggesting to give the management of a complex deployment into the hands of a person who can't program? No. I'm suggesting giving the maintenance of the "code" portion of a deployment system to a developer, and having that developer craft it in such a way that a trained monkey can write a couple lines of metadata and have it deploy pretty much whatever you need. Which is how it worked for us in the past (and worked quite well). I'm sorry but I think you misunderstood me; I was never talking about Puppet.