As we move into the world of complete datacenter automation, there is a whole new selection of issues that we are learning to resolve – from custom hardware to a variety of provisioning tools at each level of automation. These are not unexpected issues, but they certainly provide us with plenty to do while we’re trying to reduce the amount of busy work we have to do.
We’re currently in the process of stringing together applications at the various layers to do server provisioning, application provisioning, and (for internal apps at least) application deployment. The options out there are a pretty broad swath that runs from all-in-one solutions like Puppet with Razor to specialized solutions hooked together to run the entire automation process. The end result is the same, the differences are in implementation, vendor lock-in, and whether a full solution that can be implemented all at once is more important to an organization than a solution that has the most suited parts that can be implemented in parallel but have to be tied together.