remctl 3.13 released

[Russ Allbery]

Rick van Rein <rick at openfortress.nl> writes:

> Hi Russ (and remctl users),

> You are probably aware of overviewing management tools like Ansible,
> Puppet and NixOps.  I wonder how remctl relates to those.  Are you (or
> other users) aware of anyone combining them?

They're a little orthogonal, although maybe more to Puppet than to
Ansible.

remctl is, formally speaking, an authenticated RPC system like gRPC or the
like, just a very, very simple one that doesn't require that you learn
protobufs, language bindings, or all the other machinery of a full RPC
system.  (But which, in turn, doesn't have schemas, typing, or structured
arguments.)  You can use such a thing as part of a configuration
management system, or the config management system can roll its own (which
is kind of what Puppet did, although not in a straightforward way that
exposes the underlying RPC system).

You could use remctl as a transport for a config management system, but
the normal nature of config management is such that you probably want the
full power of executing arbitrary commands, which is somewhat the opposite
of what remctl was designed to do.  (IIRC, Ansible mostly uses ssh to push
stuff around.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>