Server/Configuration Management

This section provides a quick introduction to some tools that may be useful, especially for people who manage large numbers of servers. The tools 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 that decrease some of the stress and complexity by reducing the job to managing the software that in turn manages all of the servers. Okay, any system administrator or developer will tell you that this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it is close.

Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool written in Ruby. It is designed to make it easier to deploy servers and scale applications across a network and does so using a custom declarative language. It has been around longer than Chef and is both more widely known and more commonly used. However, both are highly regarded.