Two weeks ago I wrote about the Single-Pain-Of-Glass and last week we talked about Herding Chicken instead of Managing Cats. What keeps coming back is that we as people and customers are just not ready for it. Yes, we want everything to be in one management location but if we would have one for all our current challenges it would never be sufficient for future challenges and we are back to square one. So a big missing part here would be flexibility and durability. Towards the second post everyone understood exactly where the challenge lies but we are not even close to this new way of managing services & applications.
When it comes to that higher level of managing infrastructure through abstraction and automation some new scripting platforms pop up. Whether or not you want to use OpenStack for example as the management platform as such, designing it to be a sustainable program requires the sysadmins to learn new languages. The two major names today are Puppet and Chef. While Puppet has a broader audience today and is probably closer to the sysadmin, Chef is stronger and would give more power and flexibility. The flipside to both is that you'll need some coding skills.
So who's already into these new programs? What's your experience? Do you even have the coding skills this could require?
