Re: FW: Opsware eval

[Luke Kanies]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Martin, Jason H wrote:

> Saw this on another list -- has anyone had any experience with Opsware
> vs CFEngine?

I haven't directly used OpsWare, but I've tried to get as much
information on them as possible, and they gave a pretty informative demo
at BBLISA (in Boston) in January or so.

The most obvious first difference was already mentioned:  OpsWare has a
GUI, cfengine has a language.  OpsWare does have (apparently decent) web
services APIs, so you could write another interface, but it's mostly
used for integration.

The second (and probably more important) difference is that OpsWare has
two kinds of operations, deploy and audit.  'Deploy' is used to do
any actual work, and 'audit' is used to determine if a server is still
configured correctly.  The stupid thing about it is that if you want to
configure a host and then verify the configuration, you have to write
completely redundant 'deploy' and 'audit' configurations, and you have
to maintain them in lock-stop over time.

Deploy jobs, I believe, consist entirely of packages, files, and
scripts.  No higher modeling (not that cfengine is exactly long on
modeling), no management of elements not covered in packages (users,
cron jobs, file systems, etc.), and a dependence on good old shell
scripts for anything complicated.

OTOH, it is very enterprise-ready.  It supports multi-master, and its
web services API makes integration pretty easy (although what, exactly,
one would do with the API, I don't really know -- the only thing I've
really heard it used for is trouble ticketing integration).

It might also be worth checking out BladeLogic (disclosure: I worked for
them for six months).  They're a bit more functional than OpsWare is,
and last I heard they were working on creating objects that could be
used for both deployment and auditing.  They're not at all
enterprise-ready, though; they don't scale well, there are no real
integration APIs, and they only support one central master server.

I never actually used OpsWare's software, and I only used BladeLogic's
in a limited way, but I got the feeling from both of them that CxOs love
it and sysadmins, not so much.

It's probably also worth disclosing that I'm working on a tool that I
consider to be a successor to all three, Puppet:
http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet .  I don't think any of the
existing tools are really sufficient for modern data centers, else I
wouldn't be trying to make a new tool.

-- 
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a
religious conviction.          --Blaise Pascal
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config-mgmt.blogspot.com