I love RunDeck. It’s just enough orchestration to get many jobs done in such an easy way. I can take whatever’s working for me, wrap it up in RunDeck and give it to someone. I wrote a long writeup on hooking it to your Active Directory, through OpenLDAP. I’m old school.  But all I’ve ever wanted is a composable RunDeck.  To bring inter-tool composition right into my face.

So then I fell in love with Chef and Puppet as they grabbed the very necessary spotlight. Suddenly, arising from the past of CFEngine, I could now code my infrastructure! Different parts of the system worked predictably, across platforms, and with such clarity and simplicity. Chef saves me thousands of lines of code, and helps me reason about my systems on a whole other level.

But these two worlds never really fit together very well. I want my “just enough orchestration,”…