Jonathan That is the exact question I have asked myself many times. All of the major players in Configuration management have a "client" program that must run and at times requires some libraries that are newer than the platforms a company may need to support or that clients may wish supported. Another issue is the secure communication over a proprietary or SSH connection and not allowing secured VLANs or other services like RSH and Telnet over a point to point connection. Also you will find that the demand for cloud systems and the complex languages used in the "Configuration Management Systems" do not easily translate to the existing and developing cloud infrastructure. and stuff... On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 10:52 PM, Jonathan Herbert <jwherbert@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Out of curiosity, why are you reinventing the wheel here?
Don't take this the wrong way- I'm just curious why you're building something new. What does Enablement do that the other technologies you've mentioned doesn't?
Jonathan
On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Andrew Latham <lathama@gmail.com> wrote:
Lurker speaking... beware...
I have been talking with some folks from various industries about configuration systems ala Bcfg2, Puppet, Chef, and others. Many of them care far too much about the current nodes configuration status as some admin had logged in and changed something. I am authoring a system called Enablement that uses what ever technology needed (ssh, telnet over admin vlan, rsh, etc...) to push a planned system/config to the device. Monitoring and auditing are all the same at the moment as we need historical data on when a service or port started and stopped offering its planned or unplanned service. For a meeting Thursday I am looking forward to the future of configuring systems. My idea is push + netblock scanning of services. With stacks for clouds we can startup and shut down nodes easy. Would a bend over backwards config reader for all the "Configuration Management Systems" be the best medium ground from the service provider point of view?
Enablement.... Send another man to fight on the front line.
-- ~ Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama@gmail.com http://lathama.net ~
-- ~ Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama@gmail.com http://lathama.net ~
On Jun 6, 2012, at 7:58 PM, Andrew Latham wrote:
Jonathan
That is the exact question I have asked myself many times. All of the major players in Configuration management have a "client" program that must run and at times requires some libraries that are newer than the platforms a company may need to support or that clients may wish supported. Another issue is the secure communication over a proprietary or SSH connection and not allowing secured VLANs or other services like RSH and Telnet over a point to point connection.
I would argue that not allowing telnet/rsh in favor of requiring SSH is a good thing. As to the client program, so long as the system makes the client available via open source and/or publishes the required client API, you should be able to work around any library issues or system age issues by developing your own client component.
Also you will find that the demand for cloud systems and the complex languages used in the "Configuration Management Systems" do not easily translate to the existing and developing cloud infrastructure.
This is a hard problem to solve. Not the least of the difficulties is the fact that if you ask 50 engineers to define "Cloud", you will get at least 100 definitions many of which are incompatible to the point of mutually exclusive. Owen
and stuff...
On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 10:52 PM, Jonathan Herbert <jwherbert@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Out of curiosity, why are you reinventing the wheel here?
Don't take this the wrong way- I'm just curious why you're building something new. What does Enablement do that the other technologies you've mentioned doesn't?
Jonathan
On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Andrew Latham <lathama@gmail.com> wrote:
Lurker speaking... beware...
I have been talking with some folks from various industries about configuration systems ala Bcfg2, Puppet, Chef, and others. Many of them care far too much about the current nodes configuration status as some admin had logged in and changed something. I am authoring a system called Enablement that uses what ever technology needed (ssh, telnet over admin vlan, rsh, etc...) to push a planned system/config to the device. Monitoring and auditing are all the same at the moment as we need historical data on when a service or port started and stopped offering its planned or unplanned service. For a meeting Thursday I am looking forward to the future of configuring systems. My idea is push + netblock scanning of services. With stacks for clouds we can startup and shut down nodes easy. Would a bend over backwards config reader for all the "Configuration Management Systems" be the best medium ground from the service provider point of view?
Enablement.... Send another man to fight on the front line.
-- ~ Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama@gmail.com http://lathama.net ~
-- ~ Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama@gmail.com http://lathama.net ~
On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 11:51:51 -0700, Owen DeLong said:
This is a hard problem to solve. Not the least of the difficulties is the fact that if you ask 50 engineers to define "Cloud", you will get at least 100 definitions many of which are incompatible to the point of mutually exclusive.
"cloud" == "you rented in a colo, but have no clue where".
On Jun 7, 2012, at 2:49 PM, valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 11:51:51 -0700, Owen DeLong said:
This is a hard problem to solve. Not the least of the difficulties is the fact that if you ask 50 engineers to define "Cloud", you will get at least 100 definitions many of which are incompatible to the point of mutually exclusive.
"cloud" == "you rented in a colo, but have no clue where".
Congratulations of being one of the first in the room to offer a candidate definition. So... What's your second definition? If you don't have a second definition, you're just asking someone else to provide 3 or more. Owen
On 06/07/2012 11:49 AM, valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 11:51:51 -0700, Owen DeLong said:
This is a hard problem to solve. Not the least of the difficulties is the fact that if you ask 50 engineers to define "Cloud", you will get at least 100 definitions many of which are incompatible to the point of mutually exclusive. "cloud" == "you rented in a colo, but have no clue where". Only if you're talking IaaS, and that's only a very vague and not necessarily accurate description of that too. When you start describing what cloud is you've also got to go into the realms of private clouds (using, for example, openstack), on your own infrastructure in your own datacenter. That's before you even start delving into PaaS, SaaS "clouds" etc.
"Cloud" is a marketing term, not an engineering one. Paul
On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:12:09 -1000, Paul Graydon said:
what cloud is you've also got to go into the realms of private clouds (using, for example, openstack), on your own infrastructure in your own datacenter.
Same definition. The user I've provisioned still has no idea where I provisioned him.
That's before you even start delving into PaaS, SaaS "clouds" etc.
Still the same definition. You have no idea where you're provisioned from.
On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:12:09 -1000, Paul Graydon said:
what cloud is you've also got to go into the realms of private clouds (using, for example, openstack), on your own infrastructure in your own datacenter. Same definition. The user I've provisioned still has no idea where I provisioned him.
That's before you even start delving into PaaS, SaaS "clouds" etc. Still the same definition. You have no idea where you're provisioned from. Your original definition: "cloud" == "you rented a colo, but have no clue where". I know exactly where my colo is. I know exactly where my
On 06/07/2012 12:59 PM, valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: physical servers are. If I run a private cloud on those servers and provision stuff there, I'll still know exactly where my colo is and I'll still know where my "cloud" infrastructure is deployed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Private_cloud) Even that wiki page doesn't quite go far enough in defining cloud, at least compared to stuff people sell as "cloud" (as I said, cloud is a marketing term, not an engineering one. Its accuracy is negligible) Paul
It is like that supreme court judge who defined porn as "i know it when I see it" On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Paul Graydon <paul@paulgraydon.co.uk> wrote:
Your original definition: "cloud" == "you rented a colo, but have no clue where". I know exactly where my colo is. I know exactly where my physical servers are. If I run a private cloud on those servers and provision stuff there, I'll still know exactly where my colo is and I'll still know where my "cloud" infrastructure is deployed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Private_cloud) Even that wiki page doesn't quite go far enough in defining cloud, at least compared to stuff people sell as "cloud" (as I said, cloud is a marketing term, not an engineering one. Its accuracy is negligible)
-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)
By my count, we now have 3 engineers that have chimed in and somewhere between 5 and 6 definitions. Q.E. D. Owen On Jun 7, 2012, at 8:53 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
It is like that supreme court judge who defined porn as "i know it when I see it"
On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Paul Graydon <paul@paulgraydon.co.uk> wrote:
Your original definition: "cloud" == "you rented a colo, but have no clue where". I know exactly where my colo is. I know exactly where my physical servers are. If I run a private cloud on those servers and provision stuff there, I'll still know exactly where my colo is and I'll still know where my "cloud" infrastructure is deployed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Private_cloud) Even that wiki page doesn't quite go far enough in defining cloud, at least compared to stuff people sell as "cloud" (as I said, cloud is a marketing term, not an engineering one. Its accuracy is negligible)
-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)
On 6/7/12 20:53 , Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
It is like that supreme court judge who defined porn as "i know it when I see it"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio a case which is notable in this context for having four differing majority opinions.
On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Paul Graydon <paul@paulgraydon.co.uk> wrote:
Your original definition: "cloud" == "you rented a colo, but have no clue where". I know exactly where my colo is. I know exactly where my physical servers are. If I run a private cloud on those servers and provision stuff there, I'll still know exactly where my colo is and I'll still know where my "cloud" infrastructure is deployed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Private_cloud) Even that wiki page doesn't quite go far enough in defining cloud, at least compared to stuff people sell as "cloud" (as I said, cloud is a marketing term, not an engineering one. Its accuracy is negligible)
On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:30:53 -1000, Paul Graydon said:
Your original definition: "cloud" == "you rented a colo, but have no clue where". I know exactly where my colo is. I know exactly where my physical servers are. If I run a private cloud on those servers and provision stuff there, I'll still know exactly where my colo is and I'll still know where my "cloud" infrastructure is deployed
I posit the thesis that if you know where it is, it's not really a cloud, it's just a server farm with a severe attack of buzzwords. The whole point of "cloud" is that you've made "where" Somebody Else's Problem - and if you know where it is because you're still managing it yourself, it isn't an SEP.
On Thursday, 07 June, 2012 12:52, Owen DeLong observed:
This is a hard problem to solve. Not the least of the difficulties is the fact that if you ask 50 engineers to define "Cloud", you will get at least 100 definitions many of which are incompatible to the point of mutually exclusive.
That is *the* definition of "Cloud". The term "Cloud" is a proxy for the expression "under the exclusive control of a third-party over which we have no influence nor control in order to gain plausibile denibility and CYA ptotection if something bad happens". Eg: Store you data "in the cloud". Run a server "in the cloud". Put your e-mail "in the cloud". Run your application "in the cloud". See, 100% accurate! --- () ascii ribbon campaign against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org
On 6/8/2012 10:44 AM, Keith Medcalf wrote:
That is *the* definition of "Cloud". The term "Cloud" is a proxy for the expression "under the exclusive control of a third-party over which we have no influence nor control in order to gain plausibile denibility and CYA ptotection if something bad happens".
Here is my take on this... I think that hosting/datacenter admins sat around one day and lamented about the fact that so many of their clients were buying dedicated hosting servers and utilizing a very tiny percent of the CPU & storage. Often, the customer had been burned by "shared hosting" years earlier because of another shared hosting customer on the same server crashing the entire server, thus making everyone on that box suffer. So dedicated hosting became critical for many businesses who outsourced their hosting. But, again, many of those boxes sat year round utilizing something like <5% of CPU, and <5% of the available disk space (after OS installation). Then "virtual servers" matured, where you could create entire logically partitioned boxes running on the same server. These were sold as "virtual dedicated" servers, which was a step up from "shared hosting", and a step down from getting a dedicated server. But many didn't like this because they it was inherent that they were stuck on the same box with other customers. Those with deep pockets didn't take the bait. It had a niche, but didn't make for a good "sales pitch". Next, they found a way to leverage virtual servers by making it so that the virtual server didn't have to reside on one box... but could dynamically use various resources from a server farm, as needed. (for a simplified explanation). Thus, the "cloud" was then born. Now... all those unused CPU cycles and disk space are not wasted any more... they are dynamically put to use. RESULT>>>the aggregate sum of all that re-allocatable drive space and CPU cycles is ENORMOUS. It makes for a massively more efficient leveraging of hardware and software. The ratio of hardware costs to costumer revenue is massively better for a hoster/datacenter compared to selling traditional dedicated servers. That is not necessarily bad because some of the cost savings is passed back to the consumer in the form of lower prices. So this is not evil. Plus, there is an ability to "scale up" that exists with the cloud (where affordable!). But the funny part about this is that (a) the extent that cost savings are passed back to the client AND (b) the improved "scale up" technology.. those are the ONLY 2 benefits of cloud computing. Everything else is to benefit the hoster/datacenter. That so many CEOs/CTOs/directors/etc have bought into the hype, and see some kind of magical benefits seemingly beyond this... is just amazing. Personally, I prefer paying a little extra for my own dedicated and/or co-located servers... where I'm in total control of ALL aspects of hardware/software. -- Rob McEwen http://dnsbl.invaluement.com/ rob@invaluement.com +1 (478) 475-9032
Rob McEwen wrote:
Personally, I prefer paying a little extra for my own dedicated and/or co-located servers... where I'm in total control of ALL aspects of hardware/software.
You are resisting the lure back to the mainframe paradime [sic], let go of your resistance and let yourself be gently wallowed back into the comfortable cosiness of the wooly dinosaur. -- Earthquake Magnitude: 4.7 Date: Monday, June 11, 2012 23:19:39 UTC Location: West Chile Rise Latitude: -41.3731; Longitude: -87.9630 Depth: 10.10 km
participants (9)
-
Andrew Latham -
Jeroen van Aart -
Joel jaeggli -
Keith Medcalf -
Owen DeLong -
Paul Graydon -
Rob McEwen -
Suresh Ramasubramanian -
valdis.kletnieks＠vt.edu