Comments on Using Rex To Automate Your Datacentre
Using Rex To Automate Your Datacentre In my day to day work I come across a lot of tasks that I actually "hate" to be honest. Most of these tasks consist of things that are repetitive and take up a lot of time. A co-worker of mine once told me, "if you have to do a task more than once, automate it!". This is one piece of advice that intrigued me. Ever since that day I have been thinking about automation and how to make processes flow smoother than they did before. But the main question always is, what tool are you going to use for that?
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Comments
"if you have to do a task more than once, automate it!"
Thx for reminding me,
mbsouth
Great article, thank you very much!
Rex seems very interesting, will definitely try it out (already did :D) and see what tasks can be automated with it.
The article title didn't grab me, I thought that perhaps you'd misspelled Rexx, the IBM-created scripting language. ;O
I've looked into cfengine, chef and puppet previously, but the startup effort for both install and configuration always seemed higher than I could muster or was willing to have on a 384MB server. With only 20-30 servers, Rex sounds perfect. I love that it is perl - I code a little perl almost everyday.
I hope to automate all those "best practices" for software installation and configuration on my Ubuntu and Debian servers. Thanks!
Rex is just great, simple, intuitive and it comes with all power of Perl. You don't need a silly DSL, to describe your needs, if you miss a feature just go full blown perl and implement it.