Learning MCollective

Chapter 26. Grow Your Deployment

Immediately available from our installation of the stock Puppet Labs plugins, you can query and make changes to files, packages, services, and configuration-management daemons. You’ll be able to find hundreds of useful plugins at GitHub, too. However, most of my clients found the real value in building plugins that implemented a feature specific to their environment.

There are numerous ways to use MCollective that you may not be aware of yet. After some growth, you may find ways of using MCollective that nobody has thought of. Take time to consider the possibilities.

Consider the Strings Analogy

The marionette metaphor can be a useful spark for creative thought. Consider which aspects of your environment you really wish you had a string attached to. What do you want it to pull? Are you pulling it with a stick in your hand or something more complex? Does a Puppet pull to notify you of something?

Ask yourself questions of this nature:

Where do you want a control knob? Where would you attach a string?

This is an ideal situation for building a custom agent that can turn that knob or raise that lever. Refer to Chapter 15.

Of what would you like to have more information? What can you feel from the strings?

This is an ideal situation for building a custom agent that you can query on request. Or perhaps you should create a registration plugin that supplies the information periodically and a listener to collect and process that information. Find ...