Practice makes perfect
sko already mentioned it, if you're looking for ways to automate server installation and configuration you should invest time in learning chef/puppet/ansible.
As I wrote before, in certainly this project:
1. we already have a lot of active network applience, mixed vendors, and only one common they have,- COM & SSH client inside. Only few have orchestrate client inside;
2. we already have some amount of bare metal servers, several well-known vendors, all of them have Integrated Management Module, so, even replacing crashed HDD and remote loading from mounted memstik possible;
I learned Puppet a long time ago[*] and have grown to like it (it has a rather steep learning curve in my opinion). Ansible is a bit easier to get started with. It's also quite popular at the moment and many companies are migrating their Puppet infrastructure to Ansible.
I definitely agree that Ansible are easiest orchestrate system from bunch of others.
And another BIG advantage (in addition to
ability work with almost all active network applience, because only need SSH server built in applience) for SysAdmins are A
LOT OF MODULES, EXAMPLES & DOCS.
Migrating most experienced SysAdmins, and services companies to Ansible based on several things:
- easy to start with (a lot of docs, examples, solutions);
- not locked to certain network appliances vendors (because needs of clients on appliances), this also impact TOC;
- easy to migrate from other old systems for experienced SysAdmins;
- for small companies with up to 200 bare metal servers units and up to 100 physical network appliances, with not so big and complexity infrastructure - Ansible would be Ideal;
If I wrong here, Il happy to read Your correction.
Learning Puppet or Ansible is also quite beneficial for other operating systems and will definitely increase your position on the unix admin job market.
Totally agree.
Little bit off-topic:
The "traditional" admin jobs are dying out, it's all
devops and infrastucture-as-code nowadays.
I still thinking, the political and economical changes on the Far East, Europe and USA, increasing numbers of global outage, increasing numbers of hackers attacks on cloud infrastructures would pushing to situation where small/middle companies stepping back to using own facilities.
I do not remember authors name, in one book about high-loading reading calculation when after numbers of servers that company need to have come over 20, much better using own small infrastructure, from TCO, management, stability, security, enhancement point of view.
[*] In the past 5-6 years I've been writing puppet code for most of my working days.
Could You be so please to describe in short for what exactly type of solutions?