[LRUG] Idempotency vs the cloud

[David Nolan]

> tl;dr: If you don't care about running your recipes/manifests/whatever
repeatedly, do Chef and Puppet still add enough value to justify their
complexity?

No general answer. I guess you'd get the benefits of being part of a large
OSS ecosystem like:

- pre-existing set of concepts & conventions
- integration e.g. test harnesses, ohai
- ready-made cookbooks

Plus you get searchable shared state when you need it (though more tools
should have auto-discovery baked into them like Elasticsearch).

I'd love my servers to be truly ephemeral. Sadly our Chef recipes are still
littered with only_if/not_if conditions to ensure idempotence. The main
reasons being

- Data gets harder to shift about the more of it you have
- If you do several deploys a day to a cloud you pay for in blocks of 1
full hour, it gets expensive to be merciless
- It's slow to boot a fresh node/server relative to converging an existing
one

D
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