Bcfg2 V.S. Puppet

Bcfg2 and Puppets are two tools for system configuration management, where we want to install configuration files, packages and adjust permissions. It seems simple said like this, but it's near from trivial when the target machines are various operating system and versions.

Bcfg2 and Puppet, while they share the same goal, are completely different in terms of their concepts, how does the desired state is modeled. The fundamental concept here is more important than the actual implementation.

Puppet is like a programming language for system administration. It's another meta-language, with it's own syntax, to indicate what files, packages, users and such, should be present on a system. It's concepts are very close to Cfengine. Well, I used Cfengine a lot, even developing a small utility to automating the management of files under Subversion (svnengine). But, while using this tool, I really came to one simple conclusion : what a mess for so little! I ended up doing everything in scripts, which are copied by cfengine and run in a cron. Big deal.

Bcfg2 is not the same, because unlike Puppet, you don't program configuration elements, they are declared in XML document. The client, specific to a target, encapsulate actions on that target, their sequencing, error handling, etc. This model enables advanced behavior, because the model can be manipulated programmatically, which is not the case for Puppet. If you want to output a Puppet manifest, you have to output strings, which is a Middle Age practice!

Bcfg2 implementation itself has some glitches that must be fixed, but the concept behind it represents a building block for semantic system configuration management, which represent the future. Bcfg2 belongs to scientific field, while I think that Puppet has the exposure it has now because of marketing wave.

But, as the history reminds us, it's not always the best product or software that wins...