Hacker News Reader

Comment by ook | Hacker News Reader

Nothing

Automated network installer (eg cobbler) installs OS, which installs a configuration management system (eg puppet or chef or ansible) which sets up the server appropriately.

Done correctly someone logging into a non development server should be an alertable "red flag".

Even for a development server you should use veewee, vagrant, box grinder etc etc to produce something consistent and repeatable.

"Editing a file in /etc directly 'by hand' should be an obscure art done to teach internals or to scare children on halloween." -@yesthattom

View on HN

Ideal world, meet actual world.

Automating infrastructure and treating it like code is a similar shift in mindset to embracing test driven development for the first time.

It appears daunting, but once you get over the hump you can't imagine how you ever survived without it.

If you have a mythical quiet Friday afternoon install Vagrant and try and replicate your manual setup steps for a new server and share it with your development team.

Even just having the steps required to set up a development environment represented in re-usable versioned code is worthwhile.

Next time a new hire starts that afternoon repays itself when they have a fully working dev environment ready in less then an hour.

Going from that, to doing this stuff in production is a lot of work, but you get similar pay offs at every step as long as you're willing to invest a little time.

You don't have to convince me it is good. In my entire career I have never seen a company that manages even 50% of their servers this way. It has always been a situation of engineering 'being too busy cutting wood to make better saws'.

The company where i work manages >90% of its servers that way. This company is blessed with some extraordinarily bloody-minded sysadmins who made the time to sharpen the saw in the face of mounting piles of wood to cut.

Your sysadmins manage themselves where you work?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com