Systems Administration is changing, with the huge scale of internet company deployments and the popularity of cloud computing. Server deployments are often scaling faster than the systems administration teams supporting them. In order to meet the demand those teams are finding themselves changing the ways they have traditionally managed servers.
One of those changes is automation, where once a sysadmin would need to spend time installing packages by hand (via apt or yum) and modifying configuration files. Systems Automation tools have taken that task and pushed it to policy based configurations that install and configure these packages automatically. Leaving Sysadmins free to perform other tasks, like automating more tasks & finding solutions to the fires that plague Sysadmins daily.
There are many tools out in the wild for Systems Automation, the major players in the Open Source arena are Puppet, CFEngine and Chef. These tools all have their quirks and benefits and unfortunately I have not used them all to the extent to tell you which one is better than the other.
In this article, I am going to highlight a newer player to the Systems Automation scene; SaltStack.
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