A couple times a year someone comes in to #gluster and thinks it would be awesome to ave a puppet module that you could define servers and the pupet module would automatically manage adding those servers as peers and dynamically changing volumes to utilize the new assets. They get inspired and start writing manifests… then they realize they actually have to get something completed and abandon that pie-in-the-sky philosophy and just use the very convenient cli.

Two weeks ago, I was asked to speak at the Gluster Community Day in Portland about managing GlusterFS with Puppet. I started putting slides together and realized that I only had about 5 minutes of material. Make sure the packages are installed, bricks are mounted, and the clients have fstab entries. Big Whoop!

So, to have enough content, I had to start talking about the philisophical idea of dynamically managing volumes (a concept I have argued is usually overkill for most organizations). As long as I’m going to conceptualize about it, why not write it?

So I did.

Announcing joejulian-glusterfs, a puppet module for managing dynamically changing GlusterFS volumes.

Though not yet finished (I was really hoping to have it finished before this talk, but I ran out of time), it should be ready for testing within a couple of weeks.