I was at devopsdays in Mountain View CA a week ago and one of the panel discussions was on package management. I was a bit surprised to see it as a topic, as there are numerous known ways to solve the problem.
It turns out, that's exactly the problem. The topic was hotly debated and yes, there are endless possible ways to distribute packages across a large environment.
I think choosing a pattern involves deciding for yourself how secure/auditable you need your environment to be and how tightly you want to couple your deployment process to your current architecture (ie. some package managers only work on some systems, etc.). That will narrow your choices down to a handful, and then you get to dig into the implementation details and decide from there.
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I was at devopsdays in Mountain View CA a week ago and one of the panel discussions was on package management. I was a bit surprised to see it as a topic, as there are numerous known ways to solve the problem.
It turns out, that's exactly the problem. The topic was hotly debated and yes, there are endless possible ways to distribute packages across a large environment.
I think choosing a pattern involves deciding for yourself how secure/auditable you need your environment to be and how tightly you want to couple your deployment process to your current architecture (ie. some package managers only work on some systems, etc.). That will narrow your choices down to a handful, and then you get to dig into the implementation details and decide from there.