Provisioning Services

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 07:35:00 +0000

There is a large gap between folks running their own machines and provisioning those and folks running Kubernetes and having Gitops at their disposal. In the latter case you can just put some YAML in Git and apply it in Kubernetes. Folks running their own machines on the other hand… are not so lucky.

Several “solutions” have existed for years, the umbrella term being “provisioning systems”, cfengine (one of the first), puppet, ansible and more. These work, but are (too?) powerful in that they allow actions and edits on the system being provisioned. This creates (hidden) problems when you’re asking yourself questions like: “Is the system’s state correct and in sync?”; “Can we easily rollback to a previously working version?”; “What content should file /path/to/file actually have?”.

Servers on Miek Gieben

Provisioning Services