I'm curious about what automation and orchestration platforms you all are using. I'm looking for more detailed responses since I want to go beyond just "puppet" or "ansible." Specifically, I'd like to know: 1. What do you use for your inventory source of truth? How do you keep it dynamically updated? 2. Is there a GUI layer on top of your tools? 3. How many machines do you manage? 4. Do you use multiple tools for different aspects, and if so, what does each one handle?
5 Answers
For automation, I'm using Ansible, which is great for coordinating actions across multiple machines. For configuration management, Puppet does a solid job of keeping everything aligned with the desired setup. My source of truth is Satellite/Foreman—it mirrors repositories so nothing needs direct internet access and integrates well with both Ansible and Puppet. The only GUI I have is the Satellite/Foreman web UI, and I manage a couple hundred servers smoothly since most maintenance is just periodic checks and updates.
Did you mean a GUI for your management tool like AWX? Do you run your ansible playbooks from Foreman?
I'm heavily into Terraform for provisioning in AWS and use Ansible for configuration tasks. The setup allows for a dynamic inventory to make things easier. If I had to start fresh, I’d probably have Terraform invoke Ansible to streamline things, especially for cloud integrations.
Orcharhino is my go-to! It’s based on Foreman but offers more stability and supports various Linux distributions. It integrates with Puppet and Ansible and can manage thousands of hosts through a GUI, CLI, or API. It helps with provisioning and gives me a great overview of host statuses.
Using Puppet with PuppetDB gives a solid way to manage inventories, and I can query it easily to form Ansible inventories. It's been a game changer for keeping track of resources.
What exactly do you use for querying it?
I use the Uyuni Project for centralized management and state configurations. Ansible paired with Semaphore UI makes it easier as I connect to my GitLab for repositories handling playbooks for various tasks, including ad-hoc ones like snapshots or Docker management.
How's the Uyuni Project working for you? Is it really comparable to Spacewalk?
Are you my coworker?? This sounds just like our setup but we manage around 15k VMs! We pull all code from git and create dynamic inventories through custom roles in AWX using the Foreman API.