Obsolete:Fabric
Page with random moods about Fabric a python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.
From https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110904/
Bryan Davis wrote:
We could also use Fabric (http://fabfile.org) instead of Dancer's shell. This would have the added benefit of providing a way to get structured success/failure responses from each host in each batch
Ori replied:
There are plusses and minuses that come with using Fabric.
- Plusses
- Provides an elegant and powerful Pythonic analog for dsh, both in terms of remote execution and the notion of target host groups.
- Provides excellent utility functions for writing interactive console applications.
- Provides a framework for growing a library of server automation tasks that we could easily extend.
- Fabric would allow us to express the logic of scap very cleanly.
- Minuses
- SSH is slow, and fabric doesn't have another means of triggering tasks on remote hosts.
- The version of fabric in apt is old (1.3.2-5). There have been a lot of changes since then to the way Fabric does SSH, including some backward incompatible changes in 1.5.5. Even Saucy only has 1.4.3. We'd want to package the latest.
salt is theoretically faster because it has a daemon running on each host and it uses a lightweight protocol to distribute tasks. On the other hand, it is not yet a mature platform, and it has not benefited from the years of intense scrutiny that have gone into ensuring OpenSSH is secure. On the other other hand, it is already installed on the cluster. Bcfg2 is also worth a gander. It is basically a less glossy but more mature / tested than salt. <http://docs.bcfg2.org/architecture/index.html>.