Learning MCollective

Chapter 25. Use Best Practices

In the final chapter of the book, I’m going to share some thoughts and recommendations for how to make the best use of MCollective.

Make Use of Configuration Management

It is certainly possible to use MCollective to maintain the configuration of software. I have used MCollective to distribute configuration files for MCollective servers. However, I prefer to use tools for what they are best at.

Configuration management is best done by tools focused on ensuring consistency across nodes. Configuration-management agents like Puppet, Chef, and others are well suited for this effort. You express the desired state of the system through the configuration management tool of your choice, and it will ensure that all nodes are synced. In particular, Puppet has modules and Chef has cookbooks intended to manage the MCollective configuration on nodes.

MCollective is best used for requests to gather information or make a change simultaneously on tens, hundreds, or thousands of nodes. None of the configuration-management systems¹¹ are designed to make thousands of servers process a simple request in a few seconds.

It requires a lot of coding to make MCollective agents that can effectively manage configurations. Likewise, you’ll find it difficult to use configuration management to orchestrate fast action across many systems. MCollective and configuration management are two different tools that extend and enhance each other’s abilities.

Use each tool for what it is ...