Hey, trying to find some good sources that outline best practices on system installs. My Google searches are just turning up how to build from source and not much else.
I'm under the impression that package installs are best practice and there's very little if any reason to install from source. If you have to install from source it would be best to make a package yourself. Any documentation to back this up?
About to go on lunch and will explain more.
EDIT: More explanation, yay!
Okay, what makes sense for us will be building our own packages where necessary and then using official package repos for all other apps.
We currently deploy a Java enterprise application on Tomcat. Redhat is the linux distro of choice with MySQL as the database.
We have over 250 on premise servers at our customers. These are considered "appliances" and we access them on the customer's network over VPN. These aren't public facing. We also have a SaaS environment in our own private cloud, there are about 50 VMs currently running here.
So right now we do our application installs the most pants on head retarded way. We have a group of implementation engineers that go to the individual machines, compile and install apache plus all necessary packages for apache (pcre, apr, apr-util). To install java we just untar it into a certain file location. To install tomcat we untar into a different file location. MySQL is generally untarred and softlinked to /usr/local/mysql
Most of these source installs are being installed in /usr/local with the exception being Java in /usr/java.
This all seems so ass backwards to me. We are trying to deploy a new private cloud environment where we could likely see 50+ customers sign up EVERY DAY. It currently takes about 2-4 hours to install the app as it is.
I need documentation on best practices in this instance. I need something to take to my manager more than this reddit topic that goes over why we should be using rpm packages. They want me to develop a solution for this using puppet but they're starting to already build the environment out for the new private cloud. I wanted to be involved but I guess I was forgotten. I think it'll be a big pain in my ass to go to these boxes and fix them later than it will be to install and configure this new private cloud correctly from the start.
I hope that's enough info.
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