Monday, June 30, 2014

Book: Extending Puppet





Alessandro "the Great" Franceschi, prominent Puppet guru, just authored this EXCELLENT book...

Not only the book is written in a fresh and speedy language, but it really covers ALL the big important topics related to managing a complex Puppet infrastructure, using the latest technology available... PuppetDB, Foreman, Hiera with Puppet 3...

However.... I am not a big fan of Puppet, I find it really outdated in its core design and choice to develop an independent DSL rather than relying on some existing language... but one thing that REALLY strikes me weird is how late the Puppet galaxy started worrying about separating configuration from code... something that in the Java world has been done since the origin of the language, with property files with all formats, databases, any pluggable datasource you can imagine... in Puppet they started worrying only in 2010, and still struggling to define standards...Infrastructure as code, wonderful, but at least give me the power of Java 8... AT LEAST ! I am not asking for Scala...



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hei, thanks for the nice words on the book, maybe one day we should discuss a bit more about Puppet and its good and bad things :-)
(I find the declarative DSL a strong point rather than a weak one).

Best,
Alessandro

PS: Il cognome รจ Franceschi! :-D

vernetto said...

thank you so much Alessandro!

I wrote some rants about Puppet here http://www.javamonamour.org/2013/09/puppet-sucks.html . I love ranting, I am an old man without much joy in life apart from RANTING :o)