Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : How do you manage your web servers?

[HarrySX]

This question is mainly aimed at those managing quite a few web servers, but I guess it's pretty general too.

Lately I've noticed it's quite a drag when I want my admin team to perform something quite simple to our fleet of servers - whether that be running a PHP update, installing a module etc. This would take up quite a large amount of time - logging in to each server one by one, escalating to root, running commands etc. Therefore I've purchased and implemented some software to effectively manage multiple servers from 'one terminal'. It can be found here.

However I'm curious as to how other medium-large sized web hosts manage their fleet - anybody care to share?

[viGeek]

I manage a large number of Linux nodes (many clustered etc), was doing this using some custom scripts I wrote (still quite a manual process) however several months back I setup Puppet which works very nicely.

http://www.puppetlabs.com/

It makes it incredibly easy to deploy and update servers, open source and free. There isn't much learning curve either, very easy to setup and configure.

[Armored]

I like puppet:

http://www.puppetlabs.com/