[ SRE_ARENA ]
← BACK TO ROADMAP
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Config Management: Taming the Pets

DOWNLOADING CONCEPT: 1. PETS VS CATTLE...
  • ↳In the Kubernetes era, servers are Cattle.
  • ↳If a Pod misbehaves, you shoot it in the head and spin up a new one.
  • ↳But before containers (and still today in legacy or bare-metal environments), servers were Pets.
  • ↳You gave them names, you carefully installed software on them, and you nursed them back to health when they got sick.
  • ↳Managing 5 pets by hand is easy.
  • ↳Managing 500 pets manually leads to configuration drift, where every server is slightly different.
  • ↳Configuration Management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) solve this by automating server configuration using code.
▲ LIVE INCIDENTAn Ansible playbook is failing randomly when deploying to the Staging environment. It works perfectly on your local machine.
sre@arena:~/config-management
sre@arena:~$ ansible-playbook deploy.yml -i staging_hosts.ini -v