Random hacking

Some time later this month I'm going to write more extensively about a project that I've been working on, not continuously, but for the last couple of months. It is about small and medium scale projects configuration management and deployment.

For configuration management I evaluated several products like bcfg2, puppet, cfengine and lcfg, and I finally chose puppet.

For "the last mile", as I call it, the alternatives that I considered were fabric, capistrano, ControlTier and TheNewShinyWheel(tm)

So I settled on puppet + fabric. Puppet is a Ruby system, while Fabric is Python code. None of them is particularly fast, actually Puppet is slow, and Fabric is acceptable. The main problem I'm confronting with, after having learnt how to use these tools, is that Fabric does not support parallel processing of tasks.

This is a severe limitation for us. This was a pilot project. If it works well, it could be applied to many other deployment tasks. That could also mean that a single deployment has to send code or files to tens of servers, and you don't want to do that sequentially waiting for each task to complete.

At the moment, this is impossible to do with Fabric. There is an experimental fork in the works that might support parallel execution, by adding a @parallel task decorator, but it still requires work and a good dose of testing.

During my survey I looked for mature Perl-based deployment tools, but I failed at finding them. While Fabric is nice, I might be tempted to reconsider my choice. Any suggestions?