CHAPTER 33

Managing Sets of Servers

IN THIS CHAPTER

Juju

Puppet

Chef

CFEngine

Ansible

Landscape

References

This chapter provides a quick introduction to some tools that might be

useful, especially for people who manage large numbers of servers. The tools
presented here are designed for system administrators and developers—
people who are responsible for keeping more than one or two servers up and
running, managing their configurations, and so on. Systems have grown to the
point that managing each one individually is becoming unwieldy at times, and
so tools have been created to decrease some of the stress and complexity by
reducing the job to managing the software that in turn manages all the servers.
Any system administrator or developer will tell you that this is a bit of an
oversimplification, but it is close.

Because managing sets of servers is such a complex task—one on which
many thick books are written—we just provide a quick overview of some of
the options you should consider and then leave you the task of further
research. Some of these options have entire books just to themselves, but if
you are someone who needs to manage sets of servers, you will want to do it
right. Do your research. This chapter helps you get started with a quick
description of some of the tools and technologies that are being used on
Ubuntu to assist with managing servers.