I’m a little new to this VPS business so forgive me if this is an obvious question. But it seems that a lot of VPS providers offer the ability to capture image snapshots of system state. What does that mean for provisioning tools like Chef or Puppet? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to deploy a custom image across several droplets than to go through the hassle of setting us a custom Chef recipe?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Hollie's Hub for Good
Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We’d like to help.
Get started for free
Enter your email to get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.
New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy.
If you’re new to VPSs, check out Salt (considered by many to be easier to learn than Puppet or Chef). <i>See</i> <a href=“https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-salt-on-ubuntu-12-04”>How To Install Salt on Ubuntu 12.04</a>. For more info. on snapshots, check out <a href=“https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean-backups-and-snapshots-explained”>DigitalOcean Backups and Snapshots Explained</a>. <br> <br><b>“What does that mean for provisioning tools like Chef or Puppet?”</b> <br> <br>If you’re going to clone the EXACT same server across various machines, then snapshots will suffice. Where Chef, Puppet & Salt come in handy, however, is that most folks don’t need X amount of the exact same (web) server. What they need are a: database server; web server; load balancer; or clusters of them. Configuration management tools, therefore, exist to allow multiple servers to be configured from one central machine.