Usually when I describe mcollective to someone they generally think its nice and all but the infrastructure to install is quite a bit and so ssh parallel tools like cap seems a better choice. They like the discovery and stuff but it’s not all that clear.
I have a different end-game in mind than just restarting services, and I’ve made a video to show just how I manage a cluster of Exim servers using mcollective. This video should give you some ideas about the possibilities that the architecture I chose brings to the table and just what it can enable.
While watching the video please note how quick and interactive everything is, then keep in mind the following while you are seeing the dialog driven app:
- I am logged in via SSH from UK to Germany into a little VM there
- The mcollective client talks to a Germany based ActiveMQ
- The 4 mail servers in the 2nd part of the demo are based 2 x US, 1 x UK and 1 x DE
- I have ActiveMQ instances in each of the above countries clustered together using the technique previous documented here.
Here’s the video then, as before I suggest you hit the full screen link and watch it that way to see what’s going on.
This is the end game, I want a framework to enable this kind of tool on Unix CLI – complete with pipes as you’d expect – things like the dialog interface you see here, on the web, in general shell scripts and in nagios checks like with cucumber-nagios, all sharing a API and all talking to a collective of servers as if they are one. I want to make building these apps easy, quick and fun.
