Using open source for automated deployment.

Having worked at a couple of very large Linux installations (one of them having four thousand servers across three data centers, and one having about six hundred across two), and having built one of these environments completely from scratch, it becomes obvious very quickly that normal manual deployment processes, such as using a CDROM or other physical boot media, simply do not scale. Add to that configuration for different server roles and application deployment, it becomes obvious that an automated end-to-end deployment system becomes the only way forward.

This talk will cover creating and end-to-end deployment system with little to no manual intervention, using only open source tools. The open source tools involved are:

- RT/AT (Asset Tracker)

- nictool/djbdns

- dhcpd (and the pros and cons of using your own integration script)

- PXE/tftpboot

- kickstart

- puppet

- subversion

I will discuss how to turn these tools into a deployment system which will allow you, once configured, to quickly and easily set up as many servers at a time as you have SSH sessions available, and even ways to not have to use SSH sessions and kick the build off programmatically, using expect and other such tools, and to do so using different configuration and application profiles, all controlled from a central information source.