Puppet and Chef do only half the job

Going to conferences and meetups is not just for seeing the talks, it is much more for meeting the "right" people. At the recent devopsdays Mountain View I met Ernest Mueller and discovered his theagileadmin.com blog, where I immediately liked his DevOps: It’s Not Chef And Puppet blog post.

After some talking with Ernest and others at the devopsdays I realized that I believe that the Ops job contains more than most people do with Puppet and Chef: Managing the Operating System patches and upgrades.

Read my guest posting Puppet and Chef do only half the job for the full story.

Update:
In the 2012 SysAdvent Blog Miah Johnson suggests in Packages Doing Too Much? to solve this issue by going the opposite way: Deploy the entire operating systems via recipes. She also points to NixOS and Guix as an example of such operationg systems. While I still believe that using the OS packages for custom software and configuration deployment is the cheapest solution, doing that on a recipe-based OS would be also fine because then one would again use the OS tools for everything else which is the main point I am trying to make.

My Open Source Data Center Conference 2013 talk is also about this topic, access the slides or watch the video.

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