Beyond Puppet and Chef: Managing PostgreSQL with Ansible

Velocity 2013 Speaker Series

Think configuration management is simply a decision between Chef or Puppet? PalaminoDB CTO (and Lead DB Engineer for Obama’s 2012 campaign) Jay Edwards (@meangrape) discusses his upcoming Velocity talk about Ansible, an alternative configuration management offering that is quick and easy to start using.

Key highlights include:

  • Unlike Puppet or Chef, Ansible has no notion of a centralized server. [Discussed at 1:30]
  • Ansible lets you get started more quickly and easily by doing everything via SSH. [Discussed at 2:12]
  • It’s also good for small-scale projects, such as home or personal things where no persistent state is required. [Discussed at 2:47]
  • Configuration in Ansible is all handled via markup in YAML files, so no domain-specific languages (DSL) or Ruby knowledge is required. [Discussed at 3:30]
  • Ansible is easily extensible in any language (not just Ruby). [Discussed at 4:50]
  • While it’s less relevant for someone with existing configuration management installations, Ansible could be useful in certain cases, such as Puppet without mcollective set up. [Discussed at 6:11]

You can watch the entire interview here:

This is one of a series of posts related to the upcoming Velocity conference in Santa Clara, CA (June 18-20). We’ll be highlighting speakers in a variety of ways, from video and email interviews to posts by the speakers themselves.

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