O'Reilly on Operations ...
Tim's article titled O'Reilly Radar > Operations: The New Secret Sauce is causing a lot of feedback from the LISA folks,
The main statement we are trying to prove wrong is actually from Nat :
Nat replied: "Deployment tools have never been open source's strong point: OS has always been about the developer, rarely about the deployer. cf the hacker's disdain for IT who get stuck with deployment and management. That said, there are some open source tools like nagios (for system monitoring) and capistrano (for rails deployment). The feedback loop there tends to be that the people writing the tools are the ones with the deployment problem. The downside is that if your need isn't met by the tool, it may be hard to get the developer to add it.
Off course deploying a (physical or virtual) machine with working applications in less than 5 minutes keeping them higly available and maintaining a couple of hundreds of them is nothing as sexy as actually writing the 3000 lines of code that are running on those machines. :)
Back when I started working in the Internet industry ages ago, you wrote the code, you tried doing the graphics, you installed and configured the webservers, you had to make sure they were connected to the internet correctly and it was secured. We were doing both Java and Perl development, and setting up infrastructures. We were designing both the interior and the outside of a car and building the Highway infrastructure on which it was supposed to drive from the same office. So when a couple of years later our goal was to build everything with opensource tools we ran into the issue that nobody was around to setup and deploy your stuff (correclty), so rather than continuing to write the code I decided to first start building the infrastructure to deploy the code on. And that's hat I`m still doing today ...
Today lots of the stuff you need IS available, you just need to know where to look and spend some time learnnig the tools,
Integration is being worked on as we speak and the foundation of the Open Management Consortium shows that lots of companies are active in the field. Strange OMC didn't come up in the comments yet .. Even stranger that nobody even mentionned infrastructures.org .
He continued: "The deployment tools tend to be commercial offerings in open source, where Red Hat, IBM, et al. give away the open source operating system and charge like a wounded bull for the management tools. Walking around LinuxWorld Boston two years ago convinced me of this: everyone had management tools. Third party management tools suffer because of the lack of integration. Red Hat at least can pair the management people with the kernel people and get the integration they want. I'm not ready to believe that the Windows server story is 10/10. I'd say the open source story is only 5/10. There's a lot more to be done."
I can be short on commercial deployment offerings, the ones from the hardware vendors only have one goal : Vendor Lock in, and the closed ones from the (propietary) software vendors only have one issue.. : The don't do the job.
The opensource offerings however are plenty, and they work, you can integrate installation with imaging , you can combine tools that you have been using for ages to deploy physical machines and keep them for your virtual platforms and you can even use package management tools cross distribution.
And even configuration management tools such as CFengine work cross platform.
The choice is yours... you just have to make it.
What's more, I'm not even sure that the open source community understands just how important this whole area is going to be, so even if the tools and techniques were released, I'm not sure how strong the uptake would be.
Sure not everybody understands, and there is a long way to go to get the noses in the right direction.. but it's we are already much further ahead on the Web2.0 kind of management and deployment stuff than on the Large Scale Desktop User Preference management stuff.. there's tons of work to be done there. We got some good ideas, but we need more hands.
As Luke mentions in one of the comments
I've had a hard time finding people even interested in developing in this space, and I can't help but think that's at least partially because web apps are treated so sexily by entrepreneurs and media companies while operations is ignored.
I just hope some VC guys get the picture :)
There's lots of other interresting discussion in the comments , not entirely coincidential from people who's blogs I also happen to be reading ..
GeneHack confirms my statements from above
I think the thing that's really getting missed about JMason's comment is the "also see" bit at the end. People have been working on and thinking about the operations side, and it's led to tools like cfengine, puppet, bcfg, etc. They're fairly complicated to deploy (as are AD and WSS and the like), but they're cross-platform, OSS, vendor-neutral -- and once you've got them working, extremely powerful.
Luke Kanies, of puppet fame first commented
It would be nice to see O'Reilly spend 1/100th the effort that you spend
on "Web 2.0" companies, advertising projects like Puppet, Radmind, RT,
OpenNMS, and the few other open source operations applications out
there. I still get comments on my O'Reilly cfengine articles from 3
years ago, because they're about the only published works on automation.
Seems like Tim read his posting as he now will be presenting Puppet at Oscon :)
A few emails later, Nat Torkington notified me that they had some cancellations and thus there was a speaking slot available to me if I were interested.
To be honest , I didn't even bother submitting an abstract on topics such as Automating System Deployment or Taxonomy in Package Management for Euroscon as I was quite confident that the target audience wouldn't match and the paper wouldn't get selected anyhow. I'm interrested in the feedback Luke will be getting and maybe I`ll try proposing topics to future O'Reilly conferences.
But hey if Tim is still looking for related topics for the Brussels edition, I'm available to drive the full 30Km to Brussels to give a talk there :)