Comments on: Deployment

By: Randy Secrist

Randy Secrist — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:21:40 +0000

Hey Dan,

As you know, we had some pretty old systems where I work. Recently, we all decided to upgrade to a Linux stack, and I have been working on the deploy problem.

We like Puppet. We like cobbler + koan. We like Linux clusters, paravirtualization, and OS migratable services. We like YUM & RPMS. I think intelligent use of these tools can lean to a management deployment problem. There are tradeoffs, but it’s a lot better than a java only centric vision where people are non committal about what platform things will actually run on.

Now if we can just get more 3rd party vendors to see the light ..

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:10:16 +0000

My experience is with capistrano & with puppet.

Puppet can be hacked to do deployment, but, having done it, I would not recommend it. It is not really its strength.

However – 3 of the 7 items on your list are well handled by puppet (the sysadmin-like tasks). I haven’t written custom tasks (which are in ruby) so I am not sure how that works. I know trying to use it as a procedural language is difficult. So getting it to a) fetch the latest build, b) unpack, c) link, d) restart is difficult.

Personally I can’t say that I like capistrano anymore. Too much trouble with it. Dependent on the remote shell. We have many systems configured to use csh and capistrano does not like that. It’s nice at first that you don’t need to have cap installed on the machine deployed to but in the end I think this feature is not worth the trouble.

By: Cowtown Coder

Cowtown Coder — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:42:22 +0000

Now that I don’t work for Amazon any more, I can comment on Hadoop thing… and my wild speculation is: very probably.
I don’t know of any concrete plans, but I do recall some turf-protection mentality regarding the idea of doing “things like Hadoop but better”, since apparently some team(s) were investigating offering Hadoop. Kinda calling dibs on map/reduce, I guess.
(plus: “why would you want to do that, Hadoop is already done — let’s rather work on XYZ” — bah, Hadoops is nice, but that’s not end-all-be-all solution, just the first generation of things to come)

By: Dan Diephouse

Dan Diephouse — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:13:20 +0000

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m really not a deployment guy, so everything here is completely new to me. I’ll look into cfengine, bcfg2, lcfg and Fabric. But, deployment is still seems like a PITA to deal with no matter what.

By: Yoav Shapira

Yoav Shapira — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:16:05 +0000

Fabric is a simple, lightweight, trivially-easy-to-use version of Capistrano. I’ve had good luck with it: http://www.nongnu.org/fab/

By: Steve Loughran

Steve Loughran — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:54:26 +0000

“anon” -if you do look at the slides dan sites, I do mention these. As to why it isn’t mentioned -maybe enough people aren’t aware of it. It’s as if software automation stopped at the build tools, and you are down to drag and drop and hand machine configuration at the end. Which is so wrong.

Dan -are you going to be at ApacheCon EU?

By: anon

anon — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:08:50 +0000

It’s almost like cfengine never existed. People don’t even mention it. Or bcfg2, lcfg, or other pieces of free software that have been used or designed for massive clusters or large departments.

By: jon

jon — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:53:07 +0000

for our cluster (jboss), we just use subversion for everything. the entire deployment is checked into subversion and then checked out to the production servers. updates are as simple as ‘svn up’. we have scripted this to be ‘stop app server; svn up; start app server’.

another option (if you use a debian distro such as ubuntu) is to build .deb’s and deploy those. we started off with that, but found that svn was a much easier alternative to maintain.