I always worked where they used to run Puppet at regular intervals. So, distributing changes was easy and on the fly. In the new team, they frown upon running the Chef agent at regular intervals. They only use it to bootstrap the OS and then kill it. I don't understand why would anyone use a config management tool like Chef without having to run it regularly. Whatever bootstrapping we are doing could be done via basic shell scripts - Install xyz software, copy config file, restart the service.
They say that its too dangerous running it at regular intervals in production as they aren't sure if the code is idempotent.
My queries are:
- How many of you use the Orchestration tools just for bootstrapping? Isn't it like driving a Bugatti at 20mph in alleys?
- Are there any problems you see in running this at regular intervals, when you scale up? How would you handle it? (One way I know is to run the agent's in solo mode and let them download the cookbooks from some repository/artifactory that can handle simultaneous multiple downloads, rather than overwhelm the Puppet/Chef server).
- How can I encourage the team to fix the code to being idempotent and run the agent at regular intervals? Or move away from Chef to something simple as bash to reduce the overhead of maintaining/writing the code.
- Am I right in saying, that we are not using the tools the way they are supposed to be used?
- Am I missing/overlooking anything here?