Re: RFC and Questions regarding a module to automate and centralize infrastructure administration

[salva]

I've written a module, nascent, that makes it a little easier to execute a list of commands on a group of servers. Basically I create an array of servers, which I refer to as contexts in the code, each of which has an array of commands and all the commands get executed in all the contexts and all the output is gathered and returned for processing.

That's very similar to what Net::OpenSSH::Parallel does. The mayor difference is that it doesn't capture the output directly, you have to save it into files that you can read afterwards for processing.

[cbeckley]

Thank you very much for the suggestion. I've looked through Net::OpenSSH::Parallel now, and it does seem to do a lot of what I'm looking for. I've always been rather averse to leaving execution artifacts behind, but if it gets the job done, I'll get over it!

Thanks again for taking the time.

Thanks,
cbeckley

[salva]

Initially, I did not include in the module the capacity to capture output directly in order to simplify its implementation and also because I was not able to imagine an API supporting it that would make sense while still being simple to learn an use...

Over time, I have come to appreciate that way of working. Using the file-system to store the generated data escalates quite well, allows easier debugging and in most cases, the performance penalty is negligible (usually the bottleneck is in the network). Also, the mechanism is easy to understand and to use.