> However, the keyword here is "best effort". That is, it is in practice really hard to consistently bring a system from a random state to a given state X, because of the randomness of your starting state.
This is the logic that BOSH follows. Why try to converge to a desired state if you can just recreate it from a known-good state?
Why do you care about grooming individual servers when your goal is a distributed system?
Configuration management tools make the classical sysadmin's life much easier. "I have a small group of giant expensive machines to run". The constant struggle of impinging chaos on the systems that Must Not Stop Ever.
This is the logic that BOSH follows. Why try to converge to a desired state if you can just recreate it from a known-good state?
Why do you care about grooming individual servers when your goal is a distributed system?
Configuration management tools make the classical sysadmin's life much easier. "I have a small group of giant expensive machines to run". The constant struggle of impinging chaos on the systems that Must Not Stop Ever.