[LRUG] Idempotency vs the cloud

[Ivan Sanchez]

Answering the original question:

> 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?

In my experience, yes. I consider these tools to provide "live
documentation" rather than just automation. I see benefits in
developers maintaining their local test environment with the same tool
used for production (in our case: chef + virtualbox/shared vmware
server internally; chef + dedicated hosting on production), and being
responsible for evolving the infrastructure along with the
application. All other internal environments (QA/perf testing etc) are
also treated the same, which help us spotting any inconsistencies and
avoid manual changes.

Spinning fresh images could work too, but: 1) all environments would
have to run on the same infra (eg aws); 2) We would still require some
form of accurate specification of how each image was configured,
specially because we have a whole team of devs and sysadmins who are
supporting the live system.

Regarding tool complexity, we don't find it a problem yet. We have
been using chef for almost 3 years now, our recipes are in source
control and are very stable, and people are comfortable changing them
as they need (talking about mainly Java devs here).

--
Ivan