Roadmap Clarification

[Geoff O'Callaghan]

On Monday 16 July 2007 00:46:02 Jim Tarvid wrote:
> One of the issues I would like to see addressed is differentiating
> types of servers.

Hi Jim,  I can see this potentially occurring  via a collection of puppet [1] 
manifests.  The manifest can be applied locally or from a centrally 
administered location within your network.  The manifest allows you to define  
classes of applications and/or server functions and have those 'applied' to a 
generic or a running system - or equally to a server during build.    As this 
occurs the components are installed and configured as per defined best 
practice, it also allows for manifests to be updated over time with your 
local requirements and/or improvements in best practice from the community.

For example, currently ubuntu-server has a 'LAMP' selection that allows you to 
build a new server with LAMP functionality...  This could easily be achieved 
by installing a generic server function and have puppet perform the 
appropriate post build configuration of the system.   The secret is in making 
quality puppet manifests.

puppet manifests can be one-off's or repeatable tasks which could return a 
system you have b0rked to a working state (potentially) and as I said become 
extremely powerful when centrally administering servers in larger networks.

While i'm not exactly excited about puppet being written in ruby it is quite 
capable of performing a number of automatic actions limited only by the 
cleverness of those writing manifests.

Anyway, just floating it as an idea to improve ubuntu-server and if it's even 
remotely an interesting approach I can try coding up a spec for it.

Cheers
Geoff

 [1] http://puppet.reductivelabs.com/