I forgot to mention this before, it is strange that you credit yourself with defining this term when it has been well defined for some time in ops.
> More importantly, PFCTs enable and to some extent encourage modification of generated environments remotely, en-masse, without any significant capacity to ensure that individual instances within a group have not subtly shifted in configuration.
But this adds a significant weight over and above the "generative process" of running manifests. Yes, running manifests against your VMs can "fail or change in unexpected ways due to xyz" - don't do it against VMs that are currently in production! I'm not sure you've ended up with anything less error prone and you're still going to need a way to get from a fresh VM image and your output images - which is where Puppet would come in.
I'd really rather not make the entire disk image my build artefact, for fairly obvious reasons (ie: size).
You might like this, which is written by a colleague of mine, except that it is not in "opposition" to Puppet/Chef/etc:
"Adequate" is an interesting word :-) We don't consider DRBD in anything other than synchronous replication mode to be reliable, which puts a fair performance penalty on it.
I forgot to mention this before, it is strange that you credit yourself with defining this term when it has been well defined for some time in ops.
> More importantly, PFCTs enable and to some extent encourage modification of generated environments remotely, en-masse, without any significant capacity to ensure that individual instances within a group have not subtly shifted in configuration.
But this adds a significant weight over and above the "generative process" of running manifests. Yes, running manifests against your VMs can "fail or change in unexpected ways due to xyz" - don't do it against VMs that are currently in production! I'm not sure you've ended up with anything less error prone and you're still going to need a way to get from a fresh VM image and your output images - which is where Puppet would come in.
I'd really rather not make the entire disk image my build artefact, for fairly obvious reasons (ie: size).
You might like this, which is written by a colleague of mine, except that it is not in "opposition" to Puppet/Chef/etc:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImmutableServer.html