Skip to main content

Comparing Configuration Management Tools The Hard Way

I've been using Puppet for more than 2 years now, and written almost 50 custom modules, for about 4K lines of code. The more I work with it, the easier is to find a 3rd party module to solve a problem for me, and I can just focus on very specific needs.
I rarely wrote any Ruby snippets, and basically relied on Puppet's DSL. A couple of times I submitted a pull request for a 3rd party module, and got my changes merged in.

I started using Puppet for a very specific reason: there was already expertise in the company, and most part of the infrastructure pre-requirements were deployed using it (even if in a Master-Slave mode, while I favour the Standalone approach).

All this said, I can't ignore what's going on in the Devops world; many other tools are being developed to solve automation of configuration management, and with the aim of being 1. Extremely easy to use 2. Reliable 3. Scalable.

In my hunt for comparisons I've stumbled upon this article from Ryan Lane.

In my opinion, this is the way comparisons should be made: the hard way, with a 360 degrees approach. Ryan explains how his team moved away from Puppet and chose between Ansible and Salt.

I strongly recommend you take the time to go through it, as it has precious insights that are typically shared only within a team or organization.

And if you have other examples of such thorough analysis, I'd be grateful if you could comment here or drop me a note.

Disclaimer: the opinions here are my own, and I'm not affiliated with either Puppet, Ansible or Salt.

Popular posts from this blog

Troubleshooting TURN

  WebRTC applications use the ICE negotiation to discovery the best way to communicate with a remote party. I t dynamically finds a pair of candidates (IP address, port and transport, also known as “transport address”) suitable for exchanging media and data. The most important aspect of this is “dynamically”: a local and a remote transport address are found based on the network conditions at the time of establishing a session. For example, a WebRTC client that normally uses a server reflexive transport address to communicate with an SFU. when running inside the home office, may use a relay transport address over TCP when running inside an office network which limits remote UDP targets. The same configuration (defined as “iceServers” when creating an RTCPeerConnection will work in both cases, producing different outcomes.
Read more

VoIP calls encoded with SILK: from RTP to WAV

SILK is a codec defined by Skype, but can be found in many VoIP clients, like CSipSimple . It comes in different flavours (sample rates and frame sizes), from narrowband (8 KHz) to wideband (24 KHz). Since Wireshark doesn't allow you to decode an RTP stream carrying SILK frames, I was curious to find a programmatic way to do it. In fact, this has also allowed to me to earn a "tumbleweed" badge in stackoverflow . You may argue that a Wireshark plugin would be the right solution, but that's probably for another day. Initially I thought it was sufficient to read the specification for RTP payload when using SILK ; the truth is that I had to reverse engineer a solution by looking at SILK SDK's test vectors. There, I discovered that a file containing SILK audio doesn't have the file header indicated in the IETF draft ("!#SILK"), but a slightly different one ("!#SILK_V3"). More importantly, each encoded frame is not preced...
Read more

Extracting Opus from a pcap file into an audible wav

From time to time I need to verify that the audio inside a trace is as expected. Not much in terms of quality, but more often content and duration. A few years ago I wrote a small program to transform a pcap into a wav file - the codec in use was SILK. These days I'm dealing with Opus , and I have to say things are greatly simplified, in particular if you consider opus-tools , a set of utilities to handle opus files and traces. One of those tools, opusrtp , can do live captures and write the interpreted payload into a .opus file. Still, what I needed was to achieve the same result but from a pcap already existing, i.e. "offline". So I come up with a small - quite shamlessly copy&pasted - patch to opusrtc, which is now in this fork . Once you have a pcap with an RTP stream with opus (say in input.pcap ) you can retrieve the .opus equivalent (in rtpdump.opus ) with: ./opusrtp --extract input.pcap Then you can generate an audible wav file with: ./opusd...
Read more