Ask HN: Building a Linux Appliance. Ideas for config management and automation?

Hi All

Can I ask for a sanity check please?

I have built a Linux Appliance. It is delivered via CI/CD as an ISO or AMI, and autoinstalls with a simple guided menu-driven workflow and then does "security type stuff". It runs a few services on network traffic and sends results elsewhere. Consider it a "data collector" used for security investigation.

It's pretty dumb: It does one thing only. It's an appliance. The end-user has no access to the console or shell.

The menu system allows the end-user to change certain key parameters (interface related, ntp server etc), stop and start services and get stats on what's going on. All of this is done in bash - for example changing /etc/network/interfaces files and restarting internal services to change IP details.

However, the menu system is a bit of a mess. It's written in shell.

If you wanted to re-factor this, what would your approach be?

I would like to:

  - Rewrite the menu system in a more appropriate language (Python or Go)
  - The menu should output a config file (which would therefore allow appliance cloning, back-up and restore etc).
  - That simple config file should be parsed and applied to the system by an additional service.

So:

  - Python for the menu system
  - This writes a YAML based config
  - A separate Python service converts the simple appliance config into appropriate config for an automation framework
  - Let the automation framework do the heavy lifting - Salt or Ansible.

This way I can use automation framework to do the difficult and fiddly parts of Linux configuration and only need to worry about the commands.

Does this make sense?