Quite different approach from Puppet, Chef, CFEngine etc. etc...!If you have to do a task more than once, automate it!
Read more...As a system or hosting engineer or whatever normally does is first type in "datacentre automation" in Google and what you get is a lot of commercial companies trying to sell you automation frameworks. Things like Puppet, Chef etc. come along and when you look at their documentation, well, it's huge and takes a lot of time to install and configure properly. Not to mention that you need to install a daemon on every server to get the framework working (imagine trying to do that on 40-50 servers, and imagine if you have like 100-200 servers. So that wasn't actually an option for me at the time of my quest to find an easy framework to automate my tasks.
What is (R)?exWith (R)?ex you can manage all your boxes from a central point through the complete process of configuration management and software deployment.
A Simple Framework to Simply Systems Administration
Howto start using (R)?ex
Just enough Perl for Rex
How To Manage Your Servers With Rex - Best Practice(R)?ex is a server orchestration and configuration management tool. With (R)?ex you can manage all your boxes from a central point through the complete process of configuration management and software deployment.
In short words, Rex is like Make. There is a central Rexfile where you can define tasks. These tasks gets executed on remote machines over ssh. The tasks are written in plain perl.