Mcollective has been able to fire up puppetd runs for a while now, via a standalone RPC call or through the puppet commander binary (check it out, spread your load). I wanted to be able to fire up my chef clients with mcollective, to use metadata to filter what should be impacted. So I [...]
It started like a toy, to learn a little more about mcollective agents but I finally turned into something useful (at least for me). I pushed my agent “smith” on my github account. It allows you to install or remove agents within mcollective. I usually use my configuration management tool to deploy such pieces of [...]
This post follows my previous one, dealing with the reuse of chef providers of chef in mcollective. In the comments Adam Jacob had an interesting word and when I wrote my second agent, to manage package I saw it would be a piece of cake to write a really generic agent, due to the nature [...]
While developing agents for The Marionette Collective it’s often quite difficult to debug weird behavior in agents, I wrote a debugger that makes development easier. Agents tend to run in a thread inside a daemon connected through middleware, this all makes it really hard. The debugger is a harness that runs an agent standalone allowing [...]
It has been quite calm for a couple of months here. I have switched job, it explains why I had less time to post some things.I now work at fotolia, and I switched from puppet to chef (no troll intended, I still think puppet is a great tool, please read this).
However, a tool I still [...]
We’ll be releasing The Marionette Collective version 1.1.3 on Monday which will bring with it a major new feature called Subcollectives. This feature lets you partition your collective into multiple isolated broadcast zones much like a VLAN does to a traditional network. Each node can belong to one or many collectives at the same time. [...]
Amazon is keeping things ticking along nicely by constantly adding features to their offerings. I’m almost more impressed at the pace and diversity of innovation than the final solution. During the week they announced AWS CloudFormation. Rather than add to the already unbearable tedium of “it’s not a Chef or Puppet killer” blog posts I [...]
When developing plugins for MCollective testing can be a pain since true testing would mean you need a lot of virtual machines and so forth. I wrote something called the MCollective Collective Builder that assist in starting up a Stomp server and any number of mcollectived processes on one machine which would let you develop [...]
Today after I threatened to do this since around September or even earlier we released version 1.0.0 of The Marionette Collective. This is quite a big milestone for the RPC framework, I believe it is now ready for prime time as a real time RPC framework accessible from many different systems. Facilitating code reuse and [...]
I am working toward releasing The Marionette Collective 1.0.0 and finishing off a last few features. I’ll maintain 1.0.0 as a long term supported stable version while 1.1.x will be where new development will happen. One of the last features that will go into 1.0.0 is the ability to do a discovery but then only [...]
