On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 6:42 PM, Tim Connors via luv-main

But stay away from golden image based
deployments anyway. Start of with a kickstart, FAI etc based deployment,
followed by configuration managing an installation of a known set of
packages with a known set of configuration changes. Anything else will
result in you asking WTF you installed 5 years ago that you now can't
repeat because dozens of people have come in in the meantime and made
random changes in random places

Agreed.

The only problem I see: This is not widely excepted and you end up with a lot of frustration if you try.

Automation has to be understood from management so considered if it comes to decision making and establishing processes. It also has to be understood by your colleagues.

I failed miserably in "Germanizing" systems when I was explicitly hired by a former co-worker to do so (his terminology;-). I was unable to achieve much because it was like cleaning a shared house where only one person does the dishes.

These environments are best off with backing up and copying images because there is no way to explain how to install it from scratch (without having nasty surprises).

They still end up with scaling problems because even minor changes can have weird side-effects. (E.g. because there are IP addresses buried in /where/this/app/lives/config/system.xml)

Regards

Peter