I’ve started tinkering with puppet for configuration management. It’s a far more flexible and extensible tool than cfengine, so it looks like the best way to go.

It’s main drawback is lack of maturity. The documentation is fair, there’s a decent reference, but there are only two examples of configuration files that I’ve seen so far, and neither one is very complex. It’s also fairly buggy, although the author is quick to respond when told about specific problems.

I’ll most likely be using Puppet to build a J2EE infrastructure based on Red Hat. I’d like to be able to contribute bug fixes, but I’m not sure how many spare cycles I’ll have, given that I don’t know Ruby. But hopefully I can at least contribute some example files, and some manifests related to Tomcat and general J2EE web application deployments.

Assuming I do use Puppet for this project, I’ll try to post information here as I go along, in addition to the project itself.