Re: Spacewalk or Puppet?

[Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx>]

nate wrote:
> 
>> What happens in the real world is that small companies build something
>> complex that works, then are acquired by mid-sized companies that are
>> contractually obligated to keep their many separate divisions working
>> but would like to combine common functionality and the staff maintaining
>> things.  A company like MS may be able to rip out all the Suns and just
>> hope their replacement design works, but smaller companies can't get
>> away with that and the mix of equipment has to co-exist for years - and
>> their non-interoperable automation tools become extra arcane things to
>> maintain separately.
> 
> More of what I meant was those bigger companies can afford to
> keep the existing teams in place. Just look at the recent T-mobile
> sidekick thing. All of that infrastructure was Sun/Oracle/Linux.

Yeah, that's what they said.  But this was an MS acquisition and they 
were changing it...

> It took MS years to migrate hotmail off of BSD/Sun. Even after
> they migrated the front end it took even longer to change out
> the back end, but at least with the front end swapped you
> couldn't query their servers and see it was running BSD.
> 
> My last company was a small company, they bought another smaller
> one(1 person shop) for their technology(perl-based) and then spent
> the next year re-writing it to be java based. Only to lose interest
> in Java along the way and want to run everything in Ruby. Then
> they realized their ruby apps were crap and dropped them all and
> went back to their core java app..full circle I suppose.

Most things boil down to the application itself - and java is pretty 
agnostic as to where it runs.

> Today the parent company is embracing linux more and has no plans
> to migrate or re-write the app to run on something else, they've
> kept the teams in place for the most part, augmenting them
> with others from the parent over time.
> 
> Maybe I've just been lucky or something.

Don't count on exceptions to last - or that linux is inherently better. 
   Windows 2003 server and later can be reliable enough to use, so the 
only real driving force to convert is the license cost and 
administration differences.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx


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