Machinery – A Systems Management Toolkit for Linux
machinery-project.org
machinery-project.org
As this is currently only SUSE-specific I'd like to see a more general solution that produces a standardized output and this output could then be turned into puppet/chef etc. scripts automatically.
EDIT: blueprint seems to do just that, but the website is not as nice.
What distinguishes this software from puppet?
If someone isn't running SLES what would push them toward this solution?
You just run a command line tool on a node to inspect or create a "system description". You can then export and deploy a description to create repeatable systems. In this regard I think it's similar to what Blueprint[2] does (or did I guess since Blueprint seems dead now). So it's a lot more lightweight tool and has many less features than Puppet, certainly.
Another cool thing is you can use Machinery to build images and deploy to Openstack. Where I work I spent a pretty long time building similar tooling for Xenserver. Sure would have been nice to have just been able to say "oh there's a thing for that". I'm excited to try this tool out and see what it does.
I think Machinery only works on SLES and opensuse right now. I didn't see any mention of other distros.