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We start with a base image and then use puppet to manage anything that needs to be installed/setup.

I don't understand why more people don't use bcfg2. Its awesome for this purpose (and I think better than puppet or chef.)

Then educate people! Don't just say it's better, say why!

I did a midrange deployment with bcfg2 (~250 machines), and what I found is that it was slow to use.

Firing off a bcfg2 push would take almost 20 minutes, which was pretty unusable; The big problem was that it didn't handle large numbers of connections simultaneously well, so I ended up having to stagger them.

CFengine was able to do the same push in < 30 seconds. Win.

I'll be looking at Chef again in the near future. It's got a LOT of nice features; Hopefully we can make it scale out quickly.

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