[eschnou]

Indeed, the package example is the easiest one to explain but the least useful due to naming issues accross distro. It works however the same for services, users, etc.

As you mention, the approach is really similar to the abstraction in the Puppet DSL. But instead of using it to describe a recipe, you use it to remotely manage a host.

Obviously you need knowledge of the target system, but at least you can write orchestration scripts that are cross-platform and where the only data changing are package names, path, and content of files.

[dsr_]

Ok, so what did you folks learn from the other projects in this space? Why is this better than Puppet, bcfg2, or cssh?

[eschnou]

Synapse is not a puppet/chef like configuration management tool, it is used for live management & orchestration.

It's in fact much more similar to mcollective and salt, which both innovates from tools like cssh by using a messaging middleware instead of ssh to connect to the target hosts.

[ominous_prime]

Ansible[1] is starting to look really nice. It's kind of a mix between puppet and fabric, handling configuration and orchestration in a single tool. If it didn't mean rewriting all my puppet configs, I'd probably be using it by now (though I've come close a couple times).

1. http://ansible.github.com/