So what is Ensemble anyway?

[ Thanks to Ahmed Kamal for this link. ]

“Ensemble is an implementation of a new idea that has been
taking shape the last couple of years. Ever since Amazon hooked up
a remote API to thousands of machines to provide access to their
virtual infrastructure (and called it macaroni? err.. AWS), people
have been dreaming up ways to take advantage of what is basically a
robotic “NOC guyâ€. No longer do you
have to pre-rack servers or call your vendor frantically to get
servers sent next-day to your colo. Right?

“Naturally, the system administrators that would normally be in
charge of racking servers, applied their existing tools to the job,
to mixed success. Config management is really good at modelling
identical hosts. But with virtual hosts instantly available, this
left those thinking at a higher level wanting more. Chef in
particular implemented a nice set of tools and functionality to
allow this high level “serviceâ€
definition with their knife tools and simple ruby API.

“But how easy are Chef’s cookbooks to share
and use without modification? How easy are they to integrate
together? Puppet has modules that are also capable of similar
functionality, and the recent integration of Mcollective, plus
puppet Faces, has certainly added a lot of the same things Chef had
to support this kind of application modelling, but again, the
modules seem to require a lot of convention and assumption, and
tweaking to get useful.”

Complete
Story