Some time ago I mentioned that I am working on improving the MCollective Deployment story.
I started a project called Choria that aimed to massively improve the deployment UX and yield a secure and stable MCollective setup for those using Puppet 4.
The aim is to make installation quick and secure, towards that it seems a common end to end install from scratch by someone new to project using a clustered NATS setup can take less than a hour, this is a huge improvement.
Further I’ve had really good user feedback, especially around NATS. One user reports 2000 nodes on a single NATS server consuming 300MB RAM and it being very performant, much more so than the previous setup.
It’s been a few months, this is whats changed:
- The module now supports every OS AIO Puppet supports, including Windows.
- Documentation is available on choria.io, installation should take about a hour max.
- The PQL language can now be used to do completely custom infrastructure discovery against PuppetDB.
- Many bugs have been fixed, many things have been streamlined and made more easy to get going with better defaults.
- Event Machine is not needed anymore.
- A number of POC projects have been done to flesh out next steps, things like a very capable playbook system and a revisit to the generic RPC client, these are on GitHub issues.
Meanwhile I am still trying to get to a point where I can take over maintenance of MCollective again, at first Puppet Inc was very open to the idea but I am afraid it’s been 7 months and it’s getting nowhere, calls for cooperation are just being ignored. Unfortunately I think we’re getting pretty close to a fork being the only productive next step.
For now though, I’d say the Choria plugin set is production ready and stable any one using Puppet 4 AIO should consider using these – it’s about the only working way to get MCollective on FOSS Puppet now due to the state of the other installation options.
