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by Spivak
2478 days ago
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Config management isn't a magic bullet. At the core every config management platform is manual work in a for loop. Lot's of layers in the case of Salt/Puppet to make it a bit more ergonomic but you're ultimately still on the hook for all the server maintenance. No config management is all-encompassing and so without extreme diligence you will lose the state of your servers over time. I use Ansible all day every day -- it's not comparable container tooling in the slightest. |
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> No config management is all-encompassing and so without extreme diligence you will lose the state of your servers over time.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "all-encompassing". Surely all of the popular config management systems have 'escape hatches' to let you do anything you could do from a shell, which seems pretty "all-encompassing" to me. But if you mean the config management system don't completely enforce a specific 'state' for managed servers then of course you're correct. Containers don't do that either, beyond periodically replacing running containers with new ones created from a base image (and even that's almost certainly not perfect either).
Unless your container hosts are entirely managed by someone else (and probably even not then, in the fullness of time), you're always going to "lose the state of your servers over time". There's (almost always?) some state somewhere that has to be explicitly managed and thus requires, generally, "extreme diligence".
I do agree that containerization and config management are very different but, like everything, it's 'just' another set of tradeoffs to be made, hopefully depending on one's actual or expected needs and wants.