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Fast system management from Puppet Labs
Orchestration
The Marionette Collective Framework (MCollective) [1] gives administrators the ability to launch job chains in parallel on a variety of systems. In contrast to similar tools, such as Func [2], Fabric [3], or Capistrano [4], MCollective relies on middleware based on the publish/subscribe method to launch jobs on various nodes. The middleware supported by the framework can be any kind of STOMP-based (Streaming Text Oriented Messaging Protocol) server implementation, for example, ActiveMQ [5] and RabbitMQ [6].
The administrator generates arbitrary job chains on a management system that are then sent to the middleware computer that – in turn – broadcasts the requests. Administrators can use filters to address subsets of the existing nodes. The low-level protocol between the systems is simple RPC, but it also handles authentication, authorization, and auditing of the individual requests (Figure 1). The middleware messaging protocol relies on this process.
Figure 1: A middleware
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